Ebola, One Year Later: What We Learned for the Next Big Epidemic

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

Scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles budding from an infected VERO E6 cell (35,000x magnification). Credit: NIAID Scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles budding from an infected VERO E6 cell (35,000x magnification). Credit: NIAID

U.S. hospitals have not seen a case of Ebola virus disease since November 11, 2014, when Dr. Craig Spencer was discharged from Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City. While the number of new infections has declined dramatically in the West African countries where the 2014–2015 epidemic began, it is virtually certain that the disease will continue to resurface.

This epidemic was by far the largest and most geographically widespread Ebola epidemic to date, with approximately 28,000 cases (suspected, probable, or confirmed) and more than 11,000 deaths in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, the three hardest-hit countries. The seven other countries affected account for a combined total of 34 confirmed (and two probable) cases and 15 deaths.

According to a recent WHO report, these numbers include (through March of this year) 815 confirmed or probable cases among health care workers, more than half of whom were nurses or nurses’ aides. (Doctors and medical students made up about 12% of […]

2016-11-21T13:01:48-05:00November 6th, 2015|healthcare social media, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|11 Comments
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Preventing Newborn Falls

Photo by Joseph Sacchetti. Photo by Joseph Sacchetti.

An acquaintance of mine once admitted to dropping her newborn baby while feeding her in the middle of the night. At the time I inwardly scoffed—how can someone be that tired, I thought judgmentally. Fast-forward to a few years later when I can now speak as a new mother—and to being that tired.

Sleep deprivation is no joke. And it doesn’t necessarily begin when the baby is born. The last few months of pregnancy and the discomfort that comes with it make for difficult sleep preceding the birth.

Many maternity units now promote “rooming in,” where a newborn baby stays in the mother’s room rather than with the nurses in the nursery. This makes newborn fall prevention an important issue. Take poor sleep in the last months of pregnancy and the physical and mental exhaustion of labor and add pain and limited mobility from the birth itself, especially a C-section birth; large rails on hospital beds making the transfer of one’s baby from bassinet to the mother’s bed difficult; and possible pain meds for mom, and the recipe could spell disaster.

In my case, with an emergency C-section and limited mobility, I found it very hard to pick my baby up from his bassinet and bring him into my hospital bed for a feeding. Luckily my husband stayed […]

2016-11-21T13:01:48-05:00November 4th, 2015|Nursing, patient engagement|0 Comments
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Final Connection: An ICU Nurse Revises Her Feelings About Cell Phones

Illustration by Denny Bond. All rights reserved. Illustration by Denny Bond. All rights reserved.

Many of us have a love-hate relationship to smartphones, and each person (and generation) draws the line in the sand between invasiveness and usefulness in a different place. Cynthia Stock, the critical care nurse who wrote the Reflections essay in the November issue of AJN, “Final Connection,” starts her brief and moving story with honesty about such matters:

On Monday, if you had asked me how I feel about cell phones, I would have come up with this: I hate to listen to the drone of conversation coming from the person next to me on the treadmill at the gym. I don’t care about trouble with the HOA. I don’t care about a son who can’t decide on a career as a director or an actor. I work out to smooth the kinks in my soul from a job that requires me to navigate a relationship with life and death.

Today, ask me how I feel about cell phones. . . .

A good essay or story often centers around a reversal of some sort. What the protagonist believed may not be so true after all, or may be more complicated than first thought. As you can probably guess, in the course […]

2016-11-21T13:01:49-05:00November 2nd, 2015|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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AJN in November: New Cancer Survivorship Series, Holistic Nursing, Safe Opioid Use, More

AJN1115.Cover.2nd.inddOn this month’s cover, a nurse provides care to a patient at Clearview Cancer Institute in Huntsville, Alabama. The photo was chosen as the third-place winner of AJN’s 2015 Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work contest. Photographer Kim Swift shot the photo while shadowing her sister, a nurse, for a day. Swift sought to capture what she calls “the trust factor” between patients and nurses. She found a prime example of that relationship when she noticed the way one patient looked at her nurse as he explained an aspect of her cancer treatment.

To read the first in a series of AJN articles on cancer survivorship from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, see “Adverse Late and Long-Term Treatment Effects in Adult Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Survivors.” This article—the first of several on cancer survivorship—summarizes the identification, evaluation, and management of potential treatment-related effects in adult survivors of hematopoietic stem cell transplants, with special focus on cardiovascular disease risk factors.

Some other articles of note in the November issue:

CE Feature: “Imagery for Self-Healing and Integrative Nursing Practice.” Research suggests that that the use of imagery can help reduce patients’ pain and anxiety and improve their quality of life and outlook on their illness. The second article in a five-part series on holistic nursing describes how imagery can be used to encourage patients’ healing process and presents […]

2016-11-21T13:01:49-05:00October 30th, 2015|Nursing|1 Comment
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Practical Steps for Nurses to Reduce Prescription Opioid Diversion

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

“Opioids diverted from friends and family members who have legitimate prescriptions are a major source of abused prescription opioids.”

More than 800 lbs. of drugs have been collected in Lycoming County, PA, since drug collection boxes were placed in law enforcement agencies over a year ago, allowing residents to safely dispose of unwanted drugs. Here the drugs are separated from their containers before incineration. Photo courtesy of Karen Vibert-Kennedy / Williamsport Sun-Gazette. More than 800 lbs. of drugs have been collected in Lycoming County, PA, since collection boxes were placed in law enforcement agencies over a year ago, allowing residents to safely dispose of unwanted drugs. Here the drugs are separated from their containers before incineration. Photo courtesy of Karen Vibert-Kennedy / Williamsport Sun-Gazette.

Amid recent reports from the CDC drawing attention to a prescription painkiller and heroin overdose epidemic, last week President Obama announced an initiative to address both prescription drug and heroin abuse in the United States. In addition to a […]

2016-11-21T13:01:50-05:00October 28th, 2015|Nursing, pain management, Patients|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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