nursing perspective Archives - Page 61 of 158

To Be a Nurse Is a Powerful Thing: Thoughts on Graduation

By Karen Roush, PhD, RN, FNP, AJN clinical managing editor

Photo by Karen Roush.

After years of work and sacrifice, last month I successfully defended my dissertation. In the weeks leading up to my defense I found myself overcome with emotion each time I imagined that moment when I would hear myself called “doctor” for the first time. And my breath did catch in my throat when the questioning was over and the chair of my dissertation committee turned to me and said those magic words, “Congratulations Dr. Roush.”

But then something funny happened. There was no incredible high. I wasn’t walking on air. For so many years I’ve been focused on the goal of achieving a doctor of philosophy in nursing. But now that I’ve accomplished that, I am faced with a new and no less difficult challenge—what I do from here and how I make those words, Dr. Roush, mean something.

Many of you graduating this month may have similar feelings. It is a powerful thing to be a nurse. What we’ve learned in the classrooms, in hospital halls, in the connections that pass between us and our patients in moments great and small, has given us tremendous knowledge. But it is what we choose to do with that knowledge and how we do it that gives […]

Amy M. Collins, managing editor2016-11-21T13:04:47-05:00May 12th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment

Intensive Care of a Different Ilk

This month’s Reflections essay (“Intensive Care”) is by John Fiddler, an NP who describes his work as an inpatient hospice nurse in New York City as being “as close to the ideal of nursing as I have ever been.”

This is a big claim—but if you read Fiddler’s brief, artful summary of the evolution of his nursing career, which started in an actual ICU, and then his description of what he found when he went to work in a hospice, you might find that he makes a pretty good case.

Here’s a small excerpt:

Inpatient hospice to me was the room at the end of the palliative care corridor that I had never bothered to visit. I had pictured it as a quiet haven for the dying, where birds chirp outside and music is heard playing through open windows as patients calmly drift off and up into dusty shafts of sunlight.

Not quite.

Instead, picture a unit where patients arrive on stretchers in extreme pain and distress, afraid, breathless—usually with families trailing behind, holding on to as much emotional and personal baggage as they can carry. Often these patients bear the physical and psychic bruises of a prolonged ICU stay.

And this is what happens here…

Maybe the author will someday find another ideal of nursing care, or maybe he won’t, but it’s worth reading his account of the current one. Reflections essays are open access. (Click through to the PDF […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:04:48-05:00May 9th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment

“One Day He Breaks Your Arm, and Then . . .”: How Nurses Can Help Rural Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

Photo by Damien Gadal, via Flickr.

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“Imagine for a moment that your husband or boyfriend is regularly assaulting you, and often tells you that ‘nobody cares.’ Now imagine that you live in an isolated rural community. The nearest health care services are 75 miles away—and you can’t get there because he removes the car battery to keep you from driving . . . One day he breaks your arm, and then he drives you to that distant hospital. Will the nurses recognize what is happening? Will there be a chance for you to tell them?”

In this month’s CE feature, “Intimate Partner Violence in Rural U.S. Areas: What Every Nurse Should Know,” Amanda Dudgeon and Tracy Evanson explain why it’s important for nurses in all practice settings to understand the particular issues that rural survivors face and how to address them. (Most, though not all, victims of intimate partner violence are women; this article focuses primarily on female survivors.) Here’s a brief overview.

Intimate partner violence is a major health care issue, affecting nearly 6% of U.S. women annually. Multiple mental and physical health problems are associated with intimate partner violence, and billions of health care dollars are spent in trying to address the consequences. Although prevalence rates of intimate partner violence are roughly the same in rural and nonrural areas, rural survivors face distinct barriers in obtaining help and services. Because rural […]

Share this:
Facebook
Bluesky
X
LinkedIn

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:04:49-05:00May 7th, 2014|nursing perspective|4 Comments

Nurses Week: Time to Celebrate (Not Denigrate) Nursing’s Worth

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

So, on the cusp of Nurses Week, the week when Americans are encouraged to think about the value that nurses bring to health care, readers of the New York Times were treated to an op-ed written by physician Sandeep Jauhar. According to the byline, Jauhar is a cardiologist and the author of an upcoming memoir about his disillusionment as a physician. The title of the piece was “Nurses Are Not Doctors.” While the author makes sure to reassure us that he thinks nurse practitioners (NPs) have a valuable role to play in health care, he makes the usual charge that NPs are not qualified to practice primary care without physician supervision.

Jauhar conveniently ignores the many studies that have refuted this argument, while basing his case largely on weak anecdotes and one study from 1999 that showed NPs ordered more diagnostic tests. His conclusion: the NPs in the study ordered too many expensive tests because they lack the experience and knowledge of physicians (he concedes in passing that “there are many reasons the NPs may have ordered more tests”). I can’t help thinking that this piece’s publication was purposely timed to take some of the shine off Nurses Week.

I’m surprised that the Times published such a weak letter. First, along […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2018-03-28T10:24:54-04:00May 5th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|4 Comments

Compelled by Professionalism

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, writes a monthly post for this blog and works as an infusion nurse in outpatient oncology.

“Ah, Julianna.”

This greeting from a physician marked my arrival at work. I assumed he was about to give me information or an order about one of our patients. I prepared myself for the forthcoming shift—”Ready or not, here it comes.”

Instead, he did something completely unexpected. Quickly retreating to his office, he reappeared, extending towards me a bright blue envelope with my name neatly written on the back.

It contained a greeting card. Not the generic kind hospitals provide managers in bulk for staff recognition. Not the “You’ve Been Caught Doing Something Fabulous!” quarter page–sized certificates available in the staff lounge for coworkers to fill out in recognition of their peers. This was a genuine, bona fide greeting card, the kind you have to go to a store and select from a rack and purchase. Inside, he’d addressed it to me again, with a personal note in handwriting, shattering the long-held belief that physicians cannot write legibly in cursive.

Being thanked by a physician for an act of nursing I had provided for his patient isn’t what caught me off guard. During my years of practice, many physicians have verbally expressed appreciation for my nursing skills. A half-dozen have even apologized for disagreeing with an assessment of mine (only to find out later […]

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN2016-11-21T13:04:52-05:00April 30th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment