AJN in October: Ablation for A-Fib, Holistic Nursing, 50 Years of NPs, Care Coordination, More

AJN1015 Cover OnlineThis month’s cover celebrates AJN’s 115th anniversary with a collage of archival photographs and past covers. The images are intended to reflect the varied roles and responsibilities of nurses past and present, as well as to commemorate AJN‘s chronicling of nursing through the decades.

In this issue, we also celebrate another nursing milestone, the 50th anniversary of the NP, with a timeline (to view, click the PDF link at the landing page) that illustrates and recaps the significant progress made by this type of advanced practice nurse.

To read more about what has changed—and what hasn’t—for AJN and its readers after more than a century in print, see this month’s editorial, “Still the One: 115 and Going Strong.”

Some other articles of note in the October issue:

CE feature: “Integrative Care: The Evolving Landscape in American Hospitals.” As the use of complementary and alternative medicine has surged in popularity in the United States, many hospitals have begun integrating complementary services and therapies to augment conventional medical care. This first article in a five-part series on holistic nursing provides an overview of some of the integrative care initiatives being introduced in U.S. hospitals and reports on findings from a survey of nursing leaders at hospitals that have implemented such programs.

CE feature: “Catheter Ablation of Atrial Fibrillation.” This treatment for the most […]

2016-11-21T13:01:58-05:00September 30th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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The Afterlife of Trauma, Near and Far

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, is an oncology nurse navigator and writes a monthly post for this blog.

Mixed media illustration by Julianna Paradisi Mixed media illustration by Julianna Paradisi

The alarm clock rang noisily. I wasn’t ready to surrender the cozy cocoon of my bed and venture into the emotional turbulence of this particular day: The 14th anniversary of 9/11.

The week leading up to it was rough. My stepfather had quadruple coronary bypass surgery in another city. Although it was successful, and his children were there to help and support my mother, I’ve felt guilty for not being there myself, because I’m the nurse in the family, and I feel responsible for every medical problem that arises for the ones I love—even if I’m not really needed.

Besides this, at work we’re in one of those cycles where every patient gets bad news: The cancer has invaded the borders of another organ, or the patient is incredibly young for the diagnosis that’s been received. Six months into my career as an oncology nurse navigator, I realize the emotional toll from secondary trauma is often more related to a previous job as a pediatric intensive care nurse than that of my more recent position as an oncology infusion nurse.

Because of all this, I decided to minimize my media exposure to the trauma of 9/11 this year. I stayed off of Facebook, and instead of watching the morning news I listened to Lyle Lovett croon the delightfully […]

2016-11-21T13:01:58-05:00September 28th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|2 Comments
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Reflective Writing as a Crucial Counterweight to Clinical Experience

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

Kevin V. Pxl/Flickr Kevin V. Pxl/Flickr

When I first started working as a nurse, I didn’t write much. My shifts, twelve hours of chaos, weren’t stories to be told, just days to survive. I wrote only when, after a traumatic event surrounding a patient’s death, I felt like I didn’t know who I could talk to about it. I had always written in a journal, but I hadn’t really thought of writing as a tool for healing—I just knew that I felt better after banging on the keyboard a bit.

Other than this single instance, I didn’t make writing a regular practice during my first year of nursing—a choice I still regret. I covet all of those forgotten lessons, missed descriptors, and stories that I might use in my writing now, but mostly, I wish I had known that moving my pen on a piece of paper might’ve helped me heal from the consistent stress of my new work.

A few years ago, by then a relatively experienced ICU nurse as well as a graduate student, I took a class called, “Writing, Communication, & Healing.” Taught by a poet and health care journalist, Joy Jacobson, it came at a time when I needed to learn how to write—for […]

2016-11-21T13:01:58-05:00September 25th, 2015|career, healthcare social media, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Nursing Ethics: Helping Out on the Unit vs. Teaching Nursing Students Crucial Skills

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

scalesJust as no two hospital units are exactly alike, rarely are two ethical conflicts exactly alike. There are too many variables, too many human and situational differences. This month’s Ethical Issues column, “Teaching Crucial Knowledge vs. Helping Out on the Unit,” explores potential ethical and practical issues faced by a clinical instructor who must balance the duty to teach essential skills to nursing students against the staff’s need for help in meeting patient care needs.

Will there be an easy, cut-and-dried answer? Probably not. In the course of their analysis of a hypothetical scenario, the authors make the following point:

Because new situations arise all the time, and every situation varies in its ethically relevant aspects, rigid rules often cannot guide ethical action. Instead, analytic skills and transparent negotiation are crucial for resolving conflicts between values as they arise in day-to-day interaction—and for supporting the solutions we choose.

While people skills may be as important as abstract ethical analysis in dealing with real world situations, determining which ethical principles or priorities are coming into conflict may provide us with a certain measure of clarity in our approach. The authors frame the conflict described in the article in the following way:

[…]

2016-11-21T13:01:59-05:00September 23rd, 2015|Ethics, Nursing, nursing perspective, safe staffing, students|0 Comments
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Unexplained Deathbed Phenomena: Honoring Patient and Family Experience

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

by luke andrew scowen/flickr creative commons luke andrew scowen/flickr creative commons

When my dad died, a special little travel clock that he’d given me years before stopped working. It restarted a week after his death, and continued running for years. I have no explanation for this sudden lapse in timekeeping, but it made me feel closer to my dad.

I’ve heard many other stories of unusual events surrounding the death of a loved one. I was therefore delighted to read this month’s Viewpoint column, “Letting Patients and Families Interpret Deathbed Phenomena for Themselves.” In this short essay, Scott Janssen presents some intriguing research findings and a compassionate argument for speaking openly about these occurrences. He writes:

“It’s an open secret among those of us working with the dying – there’s a lot of strange stuff going on for patients, as well as for the clinicians and family members who care for them, that rarely if ever gets talked about: near-death experiences, synchronistic coincidences (stopped clocks at time of death, for example), out-of-body experiences, and visitations from deceased loved ones.”

Janssen, a former hospice social worker and now a psychotherapist, sees such phenomena as part of “the normal continuum of experiences at the end of life.” He calls upon clinicians to create safe contexts in which patients and families can share these experiences without fear that they will be judged, ridiculed, or dismissed by caregivers.

It’s food for […]

2016-11-21T13:01:59-05:00September 21st, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient experience, 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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