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A Few Quick 4th of July Safety Tips for Kids

By Tyler John, via Wikimedia Commons

By Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

It’s almost the 4th of July—the unofficial beginning of summer! After paying your usual homage to the Declaration of Independence and remembering the Minutemen and women (yes, there were women!) of Lexington, here are a few ideas for all you pediatric nurses out there on how to make this holiday—and every summer day— safer for kids:

Start a bicycle helmet collection for your pediatrician office or local clinic so every time a kid says they don’t use a helmet because they don’t have one—voilà! Here you go!
Everyone thinks their kid is a star—now’s their chance to prove it! Get your kids or the neighborhood kids to ‘star’ in a homemade video on summer safety. Then showcase it on your waiting room TV screen or at summer camp.
Safety education—along with the usual on water safety, don’t forget to provide information on lawn-mowing safety to adolescents. Don’t leave out the city kids; a lot of them spend part of their summers in the country, so don’t assume they won’t need this information also.
Ditto on grilling safety. Talk to parents of kids of all ages and directly to adolescents.
And of course, a reminder about the danger of setting off fireworks, the perennial favorite way to endanger ourselves or our kids on the 4th of July, let them drive their electric cars here, look at the 10 best […]
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Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2017-01-22T09:57:05-05:00July 3rd, 2012|Nursing|Comments Off

Forward or Back? Some Personal Notes on Why the Affordable Care Act Matters

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

So today the U.S. Supreme Court did something a little surprising in upholding the individual mandate provision in the Affordable Care Act (here’s the text of the full decision). It was the right thing to do, given judicial precedent, but it still comes as a surprise that Chief Justice Roberts was the swing vote rather than Kennedy, or that they actually did this. Justice Roberts must have looked to his conscience and seen how history would judge him. Or it’s nice to think so.

This is good for many reasons: those under 26 on their parents’ plans can now stay there. A bunch of money earmarked for nurse education will not suddenly disappear. Health care exchanges holding insurance companies to minimum standards will be implemented. Accountable care organizations can continue to experiment in an effort to replace the disastrously expensive fee-for-service model with one tied more closely to outcomes. And a great deal more.

But now we should ask ourselves: Do we go forward or back? This is the real question when it comes to the American health care system. Going back isn’t an option, though many are sure to go on pretending it is (the Republicans will make repealing the Affordable Care Act a centerpiece […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:09:47-05:00June 28th, 2012|health care policy, nursing perspective, Patients|9 Comments

Nurse Staffing: Are the Brits on the Right Track?

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

hazard/jasleen kaur, via Flickr

According to an article at Nursing Times, hospitals in England may be required to publish “nurse-to-bed” ratios as part of an overall “dashboard” of indicators to measure performance. While some say this is a step forward, UNISON, the public service union that represents nurses, argues that the better ratio to measure is nurse-to-patient and that variables in patient acuity should also be considered.

Nurse staffing has become an issue in National Health Service hospitals and in April UNISON released results of a survey of over 1,500 nurses and other health care workers about their shifts during the 24-hour period of March 6. The vast majority of respondents (73%) felt they did not have “enough time to spend with patients to deliver dignified, safe, compassionate care.” The Royal College of Nursing also supports mandatory safe-staffing ratios that take into account the skill mix of RNs to “health care support workers” or nursing assistants.

Here in the United States, California is the only state to achieve any legislation for mandatory hospital staffing and it is a “minimum” nurse-to-patient ratio. While similar legislation has been introduced in a few other states and nationally, it hasn’t advanced.

The ANA does not support mandatory minimum ratios per se, noting in its Principles for Nurse Staffing (2nd edition), released earlier this […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2016-11-21T13:09:48-05:00June 26th, 2012|Nursing|54 Comments

Nurse Blog Notes: Generation Gaps, Hypothermia, Informatics, Nurses Writing

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s skip the latest research findings, policy disputes, the unpleasant wait for the Supreme Court to decide the fate of health care reform. Here’s what we’re finding on the nursing blogs these days, a sample of recent posts you might find of interest:

The Nerdy Nurse offers “7 Tips to Be a Successful Clinical Informatics Nurse.” The post isn’t terribly technical; instead, it’s for nurses who might be thinking of going into this line of nursing, and to that end it highlights some strengths to emphasize in an interview.

At madness: tales of an emergency room nurse, a recent post called “There’s a Human Being Under There” sketches out a bit of what’s involved in inducing “therapeutic hypothermia” (for more detail, preview the July AJN CE “Therapeutic Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest”), but then steps back far enough to remember that all of these processes involve an actual person.

Those Emergency Blues takes an undogmatic look at so-called “generation gaps” among nurses. Instead of throwing stones, dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ this post takes a more sensible, fair-minded, probing approach:

Ultimately what I am trying to get at is while I am sure generation gaps exist on units, I do not believe it is entirely as a result of degree vs diploma more than it might be just personality related. Differing maturity levels, different interests, and people at different […]

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Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:09:52-05:00June 19th, 2012|Nursing|5 Comments

To the Nursing Class of ’12 (and ’84, and ’96, and ’01)

By Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP-C, clinical managing editor. A version of this essay originally appeared in the 2008 AJN Career Guide, but we feel it’s still just as relevant to new nursing grads or even to seasoned nurses (and non-nurses, for that matter) who might need a sense of renewal.

via Wikimedia Commons

On a rainy cold Saturday last May my son graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. As I sat shivering in my complimentary plastic poncho, listening to the commencement speaker doing his best to inspire the faces peering up from under soaked tassels, the thought came to me that we all need a commencement address every five years or so. Someone to tell us we can make the world a better place, that the possibility for greatness exists within us, that we may yet achieve our dreams. Someone to remind us why we chose nursing, and why we work so hard.

So, whether you are a new graduate or graduated 50 years ago, this is my commencement address to you.

Stay alert. Be vital. Sharpen your mind and your skills. Read journals for nurses and on health care in general. But don’t limit your knowledge to health-related information. Read political discourse, economic theory, and great literature. At the time of this writing, a book of poems, Slope of the Child Everlasting by Laurie Kutchins, sits on my desk at home. Each evening it pulls me into a […]