Is It Time to Relax Food Restrictions on Women in Labor?

Three years ago, I went into labor in the middle of the night, 10 days before my expected due date. Things ramped up fast, and by the time I got to the hospital an hour later, I was almost ready to have the baby. However, when my son’s heart rate suddenly dropped and wouldn’t recover with medication, I was told I had to have an emergency C-section immediately.

As I hadn’t planned on surgery, or labor, that night, I had eaten a full three-course meal earlier in the evening. The nurses asked me if I had eaten, and I had to admit yes, and then some! I did feel nauseous as the procedure began, but luckily the wonderful anesthesiologist quickly helped, when I told him how I felt, with some miracle medication in my IV. The surgery proceeded without incident.

Nil by mouth? New research questions a tradition.

It was with interest, then, that I read AJN’s March original research CE feature, “An Investigation into the Safety of Oral Intake During Labor.” In this article, the authors compared maternal and neonatal outcomes among laboring women permitted ad lib oral intake with those permitted nothing by mouth except for ice chips. Restriction of oral intake in laboring women has traditionally been, as AJN’s […]

2018-03-02T08:27:46-05:00March 2nd, 2018|nursing research, patient experience|1 Comment
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Nursing Assistants in Nursing Homes: Partners in Quality Improvement

“NAs know where the quality gaps lie.”

I loved working in a skilled nursing facility—the long-term relationships with residents and their families, the chance to really hone in on nursing basics, the opportunity to learn about life from people who had seen it all.

But what finally drove me away from this work was the mediocre quality of care in two different “homes” where I was on staff. I was angry and frustrated, and even after several years in nursing, still too inexperienced to understand what I could have done to make things better.

Including nursing assistants in QI projects: ‘crucial to success.’

Today, care is slowly changing. Nursing homes are now required to post on the web certain data about their patient outcomes (https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/search.html), and to implement quality improvement (QI) initiatives. But have we regarded QI projects as the province of RNs and administrators only? In this month’s AJN, Kathleen Abrahamson and colleagues make the following observation:

“…nearly all changes driven by QI in work processes, schedules, approaches to care, or documentation will either affect or be carried out by nursing assistants. Thus, including NAs in QI efforts is crucial to their success.”

The truth of this statement is so clear, it might be called a “no-brainer.” As the […]

2018-02-21T09:51:50-05:00February 21st, 2018|Nursing, nursing research|0 Comments
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Avoiding the Chaos of Unit Transfers

Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Johansen Laurel, U.S. Navy.

Patient transfers between units can be less than orderly, resulting in miscommunication and frustration. Most ICU nurses have a war story (or two) that quickly comes to mind if asked about a memorable admission to their unit from the OR or recovery unit. I recall one instance, when I was a clinical nurse specialist covering critical care, in which I received a frantic call at 11:30 am from the ICU nurse manager.

Apparently, the ICU had been told they would receive a patient from recovery at about 2 pm. With this in mind, the ICU had arranged to transfer a patient out to a med-surg unit just after noon. The ICU manager had worked out the transfer time with the med-surg nurse manager to allow the med-surg RN to return from lunch before the transfer, and also to give the ICU nurse a chance to have lunch and prepare the equipment in the ICU slot for the new patient after it was cleaned by housekeeping.

But as it happened, the recovery nurse manager called the ICU at 11:30 am to say her unit needed the bed and the new patient […]

2018-02-20T10:06:37-05:00February 20th, 2018|Nursing, nursing research|0 Comments
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Low Physical Activity Among Chinese American Immigrants with Prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes

“…compared with the general population, people who have or are at risk for type 2 diabetes are significantly less likely to engage in regular physical activity.”

On this month’s cover, group practices tai chi during snowfall in Shenyang, China. ©Photo Reuters/Stringer.

We all know that physical activity is important for maintaining health—for everyone. It’s especially important to prevent or manage prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.

AJN’s February research feature, “Physical Activity Among Chinese American Immigrants with Prediabetes or Type 2 Diabetes,” takes a special look at the issue among Chinese American immigrants. Diabetes is the fifth leading cause of death among Asian Americans, so researchers wanted to investigate what this population’s knowledge of and barriers to physical activity might be.

Recruiting from a community health center in New York City, researchers conducted interviews with 100 foreign-born Chinese American adults having a diagnosis of prediabetes or type 2 diabete

According to the study authors:

“Chinese American immigrants with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes tend to be sedentary and are less likely to perform moderate or vigorous physical activity than the general population . . . .The findings also highlight some of the barriers to such activity and suggest a need for greater involvement […]

2018-02-07T10:30:12-05:00February 7th, 2018|exercise, Nursing, nursing research, patient engagement, personal health practices|0 Comments
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How to Identify and Avoid Predatory Journals

Photo by Alice Rosen, via Flickr.

I remember receiving my first “accept” letter for a novel I was working on many years ago. In my excitement, I didn’t stop to think that it was strange that, before the editor began working with me, I would have to pay a large sum of money to get the manuscript into shape. When my euphoria died down and my skepticism shot up, I decided to submit a fake query to the same publisher, highlighting a novel that could never possibly get published. Imagine my dismay when I received the exact same acceptance letter.

So in a way, predatory publishing is not an entirely new concept. And in fact, many more or less legitimate self-publishing options for books, fiction or otherwise, still exist. But with the increasing dominance of the Web and the rise of the open access movement—established to help spread publicly funded research—a more invidious and widely pervasive form of predatory publishing has taken hold in scholarly publishing. And the stakes are far higher. While my novel probably wasn’t going to affect anyone’s life, articles published by unscrupulous publishers—especially medical and nursing literature—have a lot more power to cause damage.

Flawed, unreliable content.

Since predatory journals often forego rigorous […]

2018-01-19T10:56:23-05:00January 19th, 2018|digital health, nursing research, writing|0 Comments
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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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