Top Health Story Picks of AJN Contributing Editors for 2015

By Diane Szulecki, AJN associate editor

Kelley Johnson by Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr Nurse and Miss America contestant Kelley Johnson by Disney | ABC Television Group via Flickr

With the end of the year steadily approaching, AJN asked its contributing editors, editorial board members, and staff to share what they consider to be the most significant health care and nursing-related headlines of 2015 so far. Now it’s readers’ turn. See the top picks below and feel free to leave a comment to share your thoughts and additions to the list.

Clinical/Care Issues

  • The growing patient experience movement and the limitations of patient satisfaction measurements
  • The rise in chronic diseases due to lack of prevention efforts and unhealthy lifestyles
  • Substance abuse, including alcohol, prescription drugs, heroin
  • Vaccinations and issues regarding public trust of vaccines

Professional Issues

  • Nurses’ responses to critical comments made on The View and related ongoing discussion about the nursing profession’s image
  • Challenges and trends in nursing education: the shift toward advanced practice as a career path for many nurses and rapid growth in the number of DNP programs and applicants
  • Workplace stresses: staffing issues, moral distress, strain caused by an aging population with multiple comorbidities, plus an increase in the number of insured due to the Affordable Care Act

U.S Health Care and Health System Issues

2016-11-21T13:01:46-05:00November 19th, 2015|career, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments
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Recognizing and Managing Late or Long-Term Complications in Adult Allo-HSCT Survivors

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

Everybody, myself included, thought he was going to die. Another nurse on another floor had administered his stem cell transplant a few weeks prior, but as his primary nurse I was now in charge of managing its aftereffects.

Ben (not his real name, and some details have been changed) was one of the many young patients I’d cared for who suffered from a violent course of complications following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (allo-HSCT). Intractable diarrhea and skin sloughing led to graft-versus-host-disease’s usual sequelae: wounds, drug-resistant infections, looming sepsis. The walls of his bladder, scarred and irritated by the myriad of toxic drugs he’d been given, bled. One day, while I slept at home between night shifts, he lost so much blood that they rushed him to the OR. The treatment—never before performed—stopped the bleeding. But it left him in excruciating, around-the-clock pain.

Between regular doses of Dilaudid and PCA pump pushes, he cried out to me, “I can’t do this. I don’t want this anymore.” I couldn’t blame him—his cancer fight raged on endlessly. Watching his boyishly handsome face grimace with so much pain, I remembered other young allo-HSCT patients’ faces, some of them peaceful only in the postmortem.

As it turned out, Ben survived his ICU stay. I heard about his discharge to the bone marrow transplant unit after I returned from a vacation. I lost touch with him, in the […]

2016-11-21T13:01:46-05:00November 17th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments
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No Longer Alone: Nurses Supporting Family Caregivers

By Susan C. Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior vice president and director, AARP Public Policy Institute, chief strategist, Center to Champion Nursing in America; Elaine Ryan, MPA, vice president of state advocacy and strategy integration, AARP government affairs; and Trish O’Keefe, PhD, RN, NE-BC, interim president, Morristown Medical Center, New Jersey

Teaching a daughter to help her mother with range-of-motion exercises. Teaching a daughter to help her mother with range-of-motion exercises

The public trusts nurses to care for them and to teach them how to care for themselves and for those they love. But a 2012 AARP/United Hospital Fund report funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care, shows there is a big disconnect. In this first nationally representative study of families providing complex care activities, almost half reported that they had provided medical/nursing treatments, including injections, wound care, administering multiple medications, managing colostomies, and giving tube feedings and nebulizer treatments—among many other tasks that nursing students find daunting when they are first learning how to do them.

Family caregivers are expected to step right in, with little to no instruction or support. Most (nearly 7 out of 10) of those they cared for did not get a home visit by a health care professional, despite multiple encounters with […]

2016-11-21T13:01:47-05:00November 13th, 2015|Nursing, patient engagement, Patients, Public health|3 Comments
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Check my Conduct: Committing to a Better Way to Act with Colleagues

Christina Purpora, PhD, RN, is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions. She has 30 years of hospital nursing experience.

Kindness quotation. Photo by Steve Robbins/Flickr by Steve Robbins/Flickr Creative Commons

I wonder whether any of my nurse colleagues can recall having said or done something less than kind to a peer at work. Looking back over 30 years of nursing, I am aware of times that I could have been kinder. Not too long ago, the way that Emily—a less experienced nurse who was new to our unit—conducted herself in response to my reaction to her request for help taught me that I ought to consider a better way to act.

Request for Help
I was walking out of a patient’s room when Emily greeted me by name, then said, “Ms. S has one of the new IV pumps and the alarm keeps going off. I can’t figure out what’s wrong. Can you please help me?”

I felt annoyed at her for making one more demand on my time when I could barely keep up with my current assignment. Rolling my eyes, I curtly replied, “Emily, I think you can handle it. You had the in-service like everybody else.”

Seemingly unrattled by my terse retort, Emily stood her ground. “Yes,” she told me, “I used the troubleshooting […]

2016-11-21T13:01:47-05:00November 10th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 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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