If You Want to Write, Do It (and Skip the ‘Weaseling Qualifiers’)

Photo by mezone, via Flickr. Photo by mezone, via Flickr.

Are you one of those people—nurse or otherwise—who daydreams about writing (a personal essay about a formative experience, an article about a quality improvement project you took part in, a blog post about some aspect of nursing) but can’t seem to find the proper way to get started?

Since the weekend is coming and the October issue of AJN is now live on our Web site, it seems a good time to draw attention to “On Writing: Just Do It,” the editorial by Shawn Kennedy, AJN‘s editor-in-chief. Kennedy points out the one idea common to most writing advice: you have to start somewhere. You have to do it, and learn from doing it, and then keep doing it. Or, as she puts it:

One key to becoming a good writer—or a good anything—is persistence.

But the editorial also gives a range of other excellent tips from Kennedy and several experts in the field, and quotes writing advice found in AJN issues through the decades. My favorite bit is from a 1977 editorial by former AJN editor Thelma Schorr:

“ [the writer] will use the active voice and not shirk his [or her] responsibility by introducing a statement with such weaseling qualifiers as ‘It is considered that…’ or ‘It is generally believed that…’”

What a great word: “weaseling.” It’s about as far as you can get from the jargon that afflicts so much academic […]

2016-11-21T13:03:51-05:00September 26th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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What Our Readers Had to Say About RN Staffing in Nursing Homes

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

nursing homeEarlier this month, AJN’s managing editor Amy Collins wrote a post about nursing homes, basing her discussion on a New York Times article by Paula Span at the paper’s New Old Age blog that examined efforts to address the inadequate number of registered nurses (RNs) in nursing homes. While federal regulations for agencies that receive Medicare or Medicaid require 24-hour nursing services, they only require an RN to be on site for eight hours daily. According to Span, 11.4% of nursing homes did not meet this requirement.

Collins found confirmation of this information in her own experiences visiting her grandmother in nursing homes:

“There always seems to be a lack of staff—and with so many residents these days suffering from varying levels of dementia and memory problems, staff are needed more than ever.”

We linked to the blog post on our Facebook page and received a tremendous number of comments on both sites. While both Span and Collins emphasized that increases in all levels of nursing personnel are needed, some LPNs responded to our post to assert that they too have valuable skills, as well as extensive experience, in this setting—and that a broader underlying problem is inadequate staffing tied to corporate cost-cutting.

Few people would argue with these assertions. Most LPNs do the best work […]

2016-11-21T13:03:52-05:00September 24th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|6 Comments
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The Underlying Connection Is Nursing

Angel sculpture on grave marker photo by author

Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, ATCN, TNCC, an ICU nurse who recently took up flight nursing, is an occasional contributor to this blog.

I recently experienced a series of events that seemed interconnected and orchestrated.

It started with my usual morning run. I was jogging out of my neighborhood, already sweating in the summer heat and absorbed—coincidentally—in an audio podcast about trauma care, when I came upon a man sprawled in the middle of a usually very busy thoroughfare. His motorcycle, badly damaged, was lying on its side next to a car with a crumpled door panel. The accident had clearly just occurred—traffic hadn’t yet backed up and no sirens could be heard heralding imminent assistance.

I had the weird sensation that I’d been running to the accident all along. I held his C-spine and monitored his neuro status while an off-duty paramedic managed the scene. Unexpectedly, a cardiologist I sometimes work with emerged from a nearby café and held his fingers to the man’s radial pulse, and then several more off-duty paramedics arrived.

It seemed fortuitous to me at the time—not the accident, of course, but the proximity of medical personnel who were so quickly available. And I had the impression that, despite not having worn a helmet, the motorcycle rider would be okay. He […]

2016-11-21T13:03:52-05:00September 22nd, 2014|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|12 Comments
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Ebola: Infection Control Resources Make All the Difference

This post is follow-up to our widely shared post (“Ebola: A Nurse Epidemiologist Puts the Outbreak in Perspective”) by AJN clinical editor Betsy Todd. The author, Amanda Anderson, is a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City who is currently doing a graduate placement at AJN two days a week. Her last post for this blog is here.

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2016-11-21T13:03:53-05:00September 16th, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Enterovirus D68: Precautions, Surveillance, Yes; Alarm, No

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

EV68-infographicAs news coverage focuses on the latest clusters of suspected—and, in some instances, confirmed—cases of human enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) as they occur in successive regions of the U.S., here’s a quick primer on what is known about EV-D68.

Is this a new, dangerous virus?
EV-D68, a non-polio enterovirus, is not a “novel” virus—the term used to describe emerging infections such as SARS and MERS. It’s more accurate to describe it as the CDC does: it is an “increasingly recognized” cause of respiratory infections, especially in children.

EV-D68 was first isolated in 1962. While reports of EV-D68 since then have been sporadic, the CDC in 2011 reported on clusters of this viral infection in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona as well as in Asia and Europe. It’s likely that there are hundreds or even thousands of EV-D68 infections every year in the U.S. But as with many other viral infections, they will range in severity, and an infection that looks like “a cold” isn’t usually brought to the attention of a health care provider.

According to the CDC, most enterovirus infections are actually asymptomatic; this may be the case with EV-D68 as well.

Diagnostic testing for EV-D68 involves RT-PCR and gene sequencing. Most hospital labs therefore are unable to test for it. Some readily available diagnostic […]

2016-11-21T13:03:56-05:00September 15th, 2014|infectious diseases, 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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