Drive for Show, Putt for Dough: A Cliche With Some Truth for Nursing

By Clint Lange, BSN, RN, a MICU nurse at University Hospital, San Antonio, Texas.

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons

Before becoming a registered nurse, I was a resident in the wonderful world of professional athletics, where cliches are fed to you almost as much as protein shakes and supplements.

I was a golfer, and golfers are the worst in terms of cliches. I sprained my eyes rolling them so much while listening to desperate golfers try to rationalize their poor performances or give themselves some hope. “I gave it 110%.” Ever take a math class? Because what you are saying isn’t possible. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” After that abysmal last hole, you are, in truth, officially mathematically eliminated from this tournament. For you, it’s over.

I’ll admit it, I’m cynical. I didn’t see the merit in cliches then and to a great extent I still don’t. But I have something else to admit; I’m kind of missing cliches. It seems one can’t quit them cold turkey without having withdrawal.

Or it could simply be that I played in a golf tournament recently for the first time in years, and I couldn’t help thinking about one of golf’s most-used phrases: Drive for show, putt for dough. It simply means that driving the ball is very flashy and fun to watch, but it is generally the guys […]

2016-11-21T13:02:52-05:00March 13th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Women’s History Month: Nurses Started What?

Lillian Wald and other notable nurse pioneers, 1923The first paragraph of Maureen Shawn Kennedy’s editorial in the March issue of AJN, “Securing Our Place in History,” ends with a thought-provoking suggestion:

In 1980, after realizing that women were largely missing from the history books, a group of women formed the National Women’s History Project . . . and, in 1987, were successful in getting Congress to designate the month of March as Women’s History Month. . . .This year’s theme, “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives,” reflects the . . . tenet that “ [k]nowing women’s achievements challenges stereotypes and upends social assumptions about who women are and what women can accomplish today.” One might substitute the word nurses for women in this statement.

Public health nursing, school nurses, hospice, and many other crucial areas of health care today began with the efforts of nurses. Noting the many accomplishments of Lillian Wald, Lavinia Dock, Annie Goodrich, M. Adelaide Nutting, and the other nurses in the 1923 group photo on our March cover, shown as they gathered to celebrate the opening of the new headquarters of the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service, Kennedy urges nurses today to learn about this tradition and to envision how they can carry it forward:

“The story of nursing […]

2016-11-21T13:02:53-05:00March 11th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Telling the Truth, Keeping a Patient’s Trust

“Am I going to be okay?” Ami gasps. Her breath hitches, her chest rising and falling in spasms. One of my hands holds a mask to her face; the other hand holds hers. Pain has made her strong—my fingers are almost as white as her pale face, radiant with fear.

Illustration by McClain Moore for AJN. Illustration by McClain Moore for AJN.

That’s the start of the Reflections essay in AJN‘s February issue, “Am I Going to Be Okay?” Nurses tell patients ‘it’s going to be okay’ because the words can keep them calm, because no one can tell the future, because it’s comforting to hear ritualized phrases from a caregiver—even when they’re not, strictly speaking, true.

But are there times when more honesty is desirable? The author of this short Reflections essay delves into one such situation where the patient needs, above all, to feel trust for her nurse. […]

2016-11-21T13:02:53-05:00March 9th, 2015|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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Maximizing the Recovery of ICU Survivors: An Innovative Collaborative Care Model

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Photo courtesy of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Photo courtesy of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA).

ICU stays are inherently stressful, and can result in various unique morbidities that adversely affect ICU survivors’ quality of life. To better care for such patients, providers at one Indiana facility decided to create a new care model. Authors Babar Khan and colleagues report on their efforts in one of this month’s CE features, “Critical Care Recovery Center: An Innovative Collaborative Care Model for ICU Survivors.” Here’s a brief overview.

Five million Americans require admission to ICUs annually owing to life-threatening illnesses. Recent medical advances have resulted in higher survival rates for critically ill patients, who often have significant cognitive, physical, and psychological sequelae, known as postintensive care syndrome (PICS). This growing population threatens to overwhelm the current U.S. health care system, which lacks established clinical models for managing their care. Novel innovative models are urgently needed.

To this end, the pulmonary/critical care and geriatrics divisions at the Indiana University School of Medicine joined forces to develop and implement a collaborative care model, the Critical Care Recovery Center (CCRC). Its mission is to maximize the cognitive, physical, and psychological recovery of ICU survivors. Developed around the principles of implementation and complexity science, the CCRC opened in 2011 as a clinical center […]

2017-07-27T14:41:49-04:00March 5th, 2015|Nursing|0 Comments
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Recalling the Why of Health Care Reform

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor ACA ruling imageIn a brief analysis of the gradual rollout and effects so far of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) at the start of this year (“The ACA Continues to Run the Gauntlet”), I reviewed a few of the issues the law was intended to address when it was passed in 2010:

* the highest per capita expenditures of any health care system in the world

* consistently worse outcomes on measures such as infant mortality rate than most other developed nations

* increasing numbers of uninsured Americans each year, to over 50 million in 2009, the year before passage of the ACA

* unsustainable annual increases in health insurance premiums and drugs costs, leading to astonishing rates of medical bankruptcy

* a Medicare reimbursement process that rewarded the volume of care provided rather than the effectiveness of that care

These worsening issues had become impossible to ignore. No one believes the ACA is a perfect law; there were too many cooks in the kitchen for that. But it’s at least a good faith attempt to address real problems, to get a framework on the table that can potentially be improved upon. […]

2016-11-21T13:02:55-05:00March 4th, 2015|health care policy, Nursing, 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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