Nurses spend more time with patients than most other types of providers and have unique insight into patient care and the the healthcare system.

Recent End-of-Life Care Links of Note, by Nurses and Others

nature's own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons nature’s own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

End-of-life care and decision making have been getting a lot of attention lately. The Institute of Medicine released a new report earlier this year, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (available for free download as a PDF).

Nurses who write often write about end-of-life matters. A couple of recent examples:

On the Nurse Manifest Web site, a look at the realities and challenges of futile care in America. Here’s a quote:

“I am currently teaching a thanatology (study of death and dying) course for nurses that I designed . . . to support students to go deeply in their reflective process around death and dying, to explore the holistic needs of the dying, and to delve into the body of evidence around the science and politics of death and dying.”

Or read another nurse blogger’s less abstract take on the tricky emotional territory nurses face when a patient dies.

Elsewhere on the Web
Vox reporter Sarah Kliff collects five strong end-of-life essays that recently appeared in various sources.

And here’s something very practical that might catch on: according to […]

2016-11-21T13:02:42-05:00April 13th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement|0 Comments
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Bedpans and Learning: Nursing Basics Still Matter

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

Photo by Morrissey, via Flickr. Photo by Morrissey, via Flickr.

There I was, orienting to a busy medical ICU, perplexed over a bedpan. You’d think, since I was just graduating from nursing school, that bedpans would be my area of expertise. Critical thinking and vent strategies came easy; how could I possible admit I had no idea how to give a bedpan to a patient?

Frightening, to graduate from nursing school and a competitive externship program without this competency. Somehow, though, every unit I’d experienced offered patient care assistants, or patients who didn’t need this age-old tool. I’d certainly helped patients to the bathroom and cleaned incontinent ones. Despite the barrage of clinical learning, the basics of offering the pink plastic tool hadn’t sunk in.

Paralyzed, I stood with it in my hand, looking at my intubated, awake patient. I’d had the wherewithal to ask the family to step out, but couldn’t figure out which end went first. The horror of my preceptor finding it backwards would end me. Did the pointed end go towards the patient’s back? The larger end toward the feet for better coverage? Why couldn’t I remember?

Somehow, I managed […]

2016-11-21T13:02:43-05:00April 8th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement|7 Comments
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Breathing Training May Ease Depression in Dialysis Patients: Study Findings

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

It’s estimated that depression afflicts between 25% and 50% of people who have chronic kidney disease. And depression has been associated with numerous adverse outcomes in this population, including poor sleep, reduced quality of life, and higher rates of hospitalization and death. Researchers Siou-Hung Tsai and colleagues wanted to know whether teaching patients a basic relaxation technique—deep, slow breathing—could alleviate depressive symptoms.

To learn more, they developed a four-week intervention and conducted a trial. The intervention included instruction by a dialysis nurse trained in deep breathing techniques, additional audio device–guided instruction, and guided exercises. The authors report on their findings in this month’s CE–Original Research feature, “The Efficacy of a Nurse-Led Breathing Training Program in Reducing Depressive Symptoms in Patients on Hemodialysis.” Here’s a brief summary.

Objectives: The purpose of this randomized controlled trial was to examine the efficacy of a nurse-led, in-center breathing training program in reducing depressive symptoms and improving sleep quality and health-related quality of life in patients on maintenance hemodialysis.
Methods: Fifty-seven patients on hemodialysis were randomly assigned either to an eight-session breathing training group or to a control group. The Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II), the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), and the Medical Outcome Studies 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) were used to assess self-reported depressive symptoms, sleep quality, and health-related quality of life, respectively.
Results: The intervention group exhibited significantly greater decreases in BDI-II scores than did the control group. No significant differences in PSQI change scores were observed between […]

2017-07-27T14:41:22-04:00April 7th, 2015|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
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Have You Fallen Prey to a Predatory Publisher?

Predatory publishers promise prompt, easy publication. The hidden charges come later, as well as the realization that the journal has no real standing or quality control. Not only is this bad for potential authors, it’s bad for knowledge, flooding the market with inferior information made to superficially resemble the information you need.

Imagine this scenario: You receive an email from a seemingly respectable journal inviting you to submit a paper for publication. You’ve wanted to publish on this topic for some time, and this journal promises you a quick review and publication within a few months. As a new author, you are thrilled . . . that is, until you get charged an outrageous processing fee upon turning the article in. You’ve just fallen victim to a predatory publisher.

Unfortunately, this scenario is becoming all too common. These journals are often difficult to spot, with their professional-looking Web sites and names that sound legitimate, if a little vague. In fact, just recently at AJN, we stumbled across a Web site featuring a journal that looked a lot like ours and had a very similar name. (Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, has been tracking predatory publishers since 2009 and maintains a list of them on his Web site, Scholarly Open Access.)

shawnkennedyIn our April […]

2016-11-21T13:02:43-05:00April 6th, 2015|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Morgellons: Whatever the Cause, the Suffering Is Real

Image, magnified 60 times, depicts fiber-embedded skin removed from a facial lesion of a 3-year-old boy who the Morgellons Research Foundation says has Morgellons. Image, provided by Morgellons Research Foundation to AJN in 2008, described as depicting fiber-embedded skin removed from facial lesion of 3-year-old boy with Morgellons (magnified 60x).

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

As you may have read, Joni Mitchell was recently found unconscious in her home and is now in the hospital. She has attributed her health issues to a syndrome called Morgellons—a condition in which sufferers experience what they describe as fibers emerging from their skin, along with intense itching, sores that won’t heal, and a host of nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue and concentration problems.

Whether it’s a clinically verifiable illness or, as some have argued, a manifestation of a psychological condition known as “delusional parasitosis,” Morgellons is plenty real to those who experience it.

We covered this controversial illness several years back in an article called “AKA ‘Morgellons.’” I interviewed two nurses and several others about their experiences. One of the nurses (see this sidebar) was convinced she had caught the condition from a patient. I also spoke with Michele Pearson, MD, the lead investigator […]

2016-11-21T13:02:44-05:00April 2nd, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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