The Buzz at Nursing Conferences about Quality and Healthy Work Environments

“I was struck by the preponderance of sessions dealing specifically with incivility and bullying (in both academia and practice settings).”

Recent back-to-back nursing meetings gave me a lot of food for thought. After attending conferences, I like to find the overall theme—not just from the scheduled topics, but from the posters and the exhibits and the general “buzz” from conversations. Here’s my take on the two meetings I attended this month.

ANA’s 2017 Translating Quality into Practice Conference

This conference started with an opening session focused on quality from a consumer point of view. Keynote speaker Harry Greenspun asserted that today “it’s the patient or family’s responsibility that the right thing happens at the right time by the right person.” Nurses, he said, are the group that needs to engage and empower consumers (who, he said, should only be called patients when they are receiving care) in improving care.

ANA president Pam Cipriano added that “nurses are the ones doing the work on quality—all the projects and quality improvement is being done on the backs of nurses.”

While some sessions focused on specific clinical practices (reducing hospital-acquired infections or falls, for example), many focused on broader aspects of quality improvement—how systems can support QI change and integrate new technology (mobile apps, simulation).

There was also discussion relating to staffing strategies and teams (though the cynic in me feels that much of the strategies […]

2017-03-29T13:31:16-04:00March 29th, 2017|Nursing|0 Comments
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AJN in April: Nurse Perceptions of Risk for Harm, Climate Change and Mental Health, More

The April issue of AJN is now live. Here are some articles we’d like to bring to your attention.

CE Feature: Original Research: Do Nurses or Electronic Assessment Tools Better Predict Risk for Harm?

In many hospitals, nurse-led “safety huddles” are used to relay patient safety information, although whether this effectively identifies patients at risk for harm has not been determined. New electronic risk assessment tools are designed to identify patients at risk for harm during hospitalization, based on specific markers in the electronic health record. The authors of this study compared the results of both methods, finding statistically significant differences in the way nurses and data mining software identify risk of harm. In many instances, factors that the software captured had been anticipated by the nurses or were already addressed in the plan of care.

CE Feature: Overactive Bladder in Women

This article provides an evidence-based review of the screening, assessment, and management of overactive bladder in women, many of whom do not seek help for the condition and try to self-manage its symptoms, which may inadvertently worsen them. Those with overactive bladder often experience related physical and psychological symptoms and report a poorer quality of life than […]

2017-03-27T09:34:06-04:00March 27th, 2017|Nursing|0 Comments
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Nurses Try Out Plant-Based Diet, Report Health Benefits

            If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?

Photo from Shutterstock.

This adage, sometimes attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, reminds us that the personal choices we make are important. Drugs and procedures are unlikely to ensure continuing good health, especially if we don’t first attend to the basics. And when it comes to personal choices, nothing is quite as personal as food.

Maybe this is why some nurses and physicians are so quick to dismiss decades of promising research on the effects of meatless diets. “People will never change the way they eat; it’s not worth talking about.” But as Michael Greger, a general practitioner specializing in nutrition and an advocate for plant-based diets, once said in a lecture I attended, “That attitude may be one of the true leading causes of death and disability.”

In “A Plant-Based Nutrition Program” in this month’s AJN, Joanne Evans and colleagues describe the results of a “personal experiment” in which nurses at three faculty-led community health clinics associated with George Mason University followed a plant-based diet for three weeks. Their goals were to

2017-12-19T10:03:39-05:00March 22nd, 2017|Nursing, nursing research|11 Comments
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Worked at Home During the Blizzard? Not Nurses

Photo: MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann/via Wikimedia Commons

We’ve come through another blizzard here in New York. Many people worked from home that day (we did, at AJN, since the office was closed), or enjoyed the luxury of spending the day safe at home with family. But most nurses had to find a way to get to work.

Long Slog to the Bronx

Many years ago, I worked the evening shift at a hospital for the terminally ill. I was assigned to work on the day of a blizzard. I love my work and had no one to worry about at home, so I was determined to get to the hospital. I usually took a bus across the Bronx to work, but the buses weren’t running. My only option was to take the subway south […]

2017-03-20T09:40:52-04:00March 17th, 2017|Nursing, nursing stories|3 Comments
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Women’s History and Nursing’s History

This year’s theme of Women’s History Month, which we celebrate each March, is focused on women’s achievements in business and the labor force, but we don’t need this reason to take time out to remember the strong women who have shaped nursing. We certainly have many of them.

As I wrote in an editorial marking women’s history month in 2015:

Most people still don’t understand all that nurses have done—and continue to do—to improve health care. Most would likely recognize the name of Florence Nightingale. But I wonder if any other nurses would come to mind. I wonder how many nonnurses know that Lillian Wald developed the community health system (she founded New York City’s Henry Street Settlement), pioneered public health and school nursing, and helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; or that Florence Wald (no relation to Lillian) brought hospice care to the United States; or that it was Kathryn Barnard’s research that established the beneficial effects of rocking and heartbeat sounds on premature infants, which is why most neonatal ICUs and newborn nurseries contain rocking chairs.

Lillian Wald and other notable nurse pioneers, 1923 March 2015 cover showing Lillian Wald and others at Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service, 1923.

Despite gains in professionalism and education, nurses still are not well represented […]

2017-03-29T11:15:38-04:00March 16th, 2017|Nursing, nursing history|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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