This is really pretty wonderful: a video showing a student nurse, Molly Case, addressing the Royal College of Nursing 2013 Congress with an eloquent poem that is the best response possible to the criticisms recently leveled at England’s National Health Service. Please take a minute and watch it. It’s worth it.
Today starts Nurses Week. AJN is participating in Lippincott’s Nurses Week initiative, and the entire May issue will be set for open access this week. Additionally, we are reprinting here a wonderful editorial from one of AJN’s former editors, Mary Mallison (click the text below for a larger version, or go to this link for the PDF version, free until June 6). Check in each day as we post voices from nurses from the AJN archives. Enjoy and take pride in our profession, in all that nurses have accomplished, and what nurses are doing today.—Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor
Cellphone macro by Cubosh, via Flickr
Myocardial revascularization, an established treatment for coronary heart disease, is currently done via either percutaneous coronary intervention or coronary artery bypass graft surgery. But recovery and rehabilitation can be hard going, and patients need close monitoring. Investigators Rejane K. Furuya and colleagues wanted to learn more about the use of telephone follow-up with such patients. To that end, they searched the literature, identified relevant studies, and assessed and synthesized the results. In this month’s original research CE, “Telephone Follow-Up for Patients After Myocardial Revascularization: A Systematic Review,” they report on their findings. Here’s a short summary.
The review was conducted in accordance with the Cochrane method. The researchers searched six electronic databases for articles on clinical trials that studied patients after myocardial revascularization using telephone follow-up and were published in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Of 170 identified studies, seven met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed.
Some findings. Both the purposes and contents of telephone follow-up varied in the analyzed studies. The researchers found that the contents could be grouped into four themes—cardiovascular illness; postoperative complications; self-care, including behavioral and lifestyle changes; and psychosocial evaluation and emotional support. Outcome measures also varied widely, but included health-related quality of life, pain, enrollment in cardiac rehabilitation programs, physical functioning, hospital readmission, mood symptoms, and medication compliance. Telephone follow-up was found to be “an effective intervention for most of the outcomes assessed.”
The […]
To briefly toot our own horn: The American Society of Healthcare Publication Editors (ASHPE) recognizes editorial excellence and achievement in the field of health care publishing. AJN has received 2013 silver awards for the October 2012 cover (see image below) and for three blog posts:
“Grief: The Proposed DSM-5 Gets It Wrong,” by Karen Roush, AJN clinical managing editor
“The Cruel Irony of Alzheimer’s Disease,” by Amy Collins, AJN editor
“Forward or Back? Some Personal Notes on Why the Affordable Care Act Matters,” by Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor
By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
Back in the day when I was a bedside nurse, hemodynamic monitoring was just coming into play, and then only in coronary care. In the ER, we relied on a combination of vital signs (pulse and BP), urine output, and central venous pressure (CVP) to guide fluid administration. Later, patients in need of close monitoring received arterial lines to monitor pulmonary arterial pressures; monitors and stopcocks were everywhere (and soon after, infections, but that’s another story . . . ).
But things are changing again, and the trend is toward less-invasive monitoring. In our May issue, we’re pleased to bring you a comprehensive CE article (worth 2.6 contact hours), “Using Functional Hemodynamic Indicators to Guide Fluid Therapy.” The author is Elizabeth Bridges, PhD, RN, CCNS, an associate professor in biobehavioral nursing and health systems at the University of Washington School of Nursing and a clinical nurse researcher at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. Many critical care nurses will know her from her “standing room only” research sessions at the American Association of Critical Care Nurses National Teaching Institute (this year it will be in Boston, May 20–23), in my view one of the best annual national nursing meetings.
Here’s the article abstract:
Hemodynamic monitoring has traditionally relied on such static pressure measurements as pulmonary artery occlusion pressure and central venous pressure to guide fluid therapy. Over the past 15 years, however, there’s been a shift toward less invasive or noninvasive monitoring methods, which […]