Nursing Archives - Page 313 of 406

Charla Nash Fights On

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—This weekend, I saw an article about Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman who was viciously attacked in February 2009 by a friend’s chimpanzee. (Click image at left for article and video at CNN.) She had suffered terrible injuries to her face and hands that left her without hands and eyes and severely disfigured. Last month, she received a face transplant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She also received hand transplants, but they failed to take and were removed because of sepsis.

It’s truly a tragic story. Christine Moffa, our clinical editor at the time, wrote a few blog posts about Charla back in 2009. She’d seen Charla’s brother Steve on the The Today Show, where he’d reported that the first thing his sister had said upon waking from her coma was the name of her nurse, Lisa. As she wrote in that first post, “Steve Nash attributed her response to the nurse to the fact that the nurses had always talked to [Charla] as if she were awake.” (Subsequent posts by Christine included photos of Charla that her brother had been kind enough to share.) […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:12:43-05:00June 13th, 2011|Nursing|0 Comments

Getting Nursing News (Whether You Like It Or Not)

By Gail M. Pfeifer, AJN news director

During a recent public radio interview between Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to President Obama, and Republican strategist Frank Luntz (author of Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear), Dunn remarked that folks “increasingly seek people they already agree with to get their news from.” (Here’s the show’s transcript.)

That is a sad commentary on the state of news journalism today. By definition, a journalist’s report should be fair and unbiased. And news reporting, above all, should be held to that high standard.

If you read AJN’s news department regularly (here’s the current issue’s table of contents; scroll down to find links to the new articles), and we hope you do, we should tell you how we try to maintain such standards. […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:12:44-05:00June 10th, 2011|healthcare social media, nursing perspective|0 Comments

A Reminder On Keeping Problems in Perspective

I’m sure there are many people like me who worry about issues and problems that gnaw at them—things they should do, must do, are expected to do, would like to do, etc., but don’t do. We wish things were different, that we had more time, more money, more help. If only this one thing were better, we could (fill in the blank).

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:12:46-05:00June 8th, 2011|Nursing|2 Comments

Tragedy into Policy: A Hepatitis C Outbreak and a Study of Nevada RNs Lead to New Protections for Whistleblowers

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

In 2008, more than 62,000 people who had undergone procedures at one of two southern Nevada endoscopy clinics were notified that “they might have been exposed to bloodborne pathogens, including hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus (HCV), and HIV, as a result of unsafe injection practices.” As author Lisa Black reports in this month’s CE–Original Research feature, a subsequent investigation by federal and state agencies found multiple breaches of infection control protocols. Indeed, 115 patients were found to be “either certainly or presumptively infected” with HCV through the reuse of contaminated medication vials.

Especially distressing was strong anecdotal evidence that because of a general fear of workplace retaliation, staff at the two clinics had often failed to report unsafe patient care conditions. At the request of the Nevada legislature, a study was conducted to examine Nevada RNs’ experiences with workplace attitudes toward patient advocacy activities. Black was the principal investigator. […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:12:47-05:00June 7th, 2011|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment

A Primary Source Reminder from the Early Days of HIV/AIDS

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I received a press release from the National Institutes of Health noting the publication 30 years ago of the first ‘official’ report that many consider to have heralded the beginning of the AIDS epidemic—a report in the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report), a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma in otherwise healthy young men who all happened to be gay.

This report (which included various causative theories, including speculation that the weakened immune system among these gay men might somehow have resulted from the use of lifestyle drugs such as amyl nitrate!), seemed late in coming for those of us who’d been seeing unusual infections among gay men since the mid-1970s.

In 1975, I became aware of these young men when they started coming for diagnostic consultation with the physicians I worked with in a private hematology–oncology practice in New York City. No one could figure out why they had developed opportunistic infections that were normally seen only in patients who’d been on chemotherapy or who had other immune disorders. We talked about the fact that similar cases were being seen at the (now defunct) St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Greenwich Village. […]