Diabetes, Hypertension, Obesity. . .The Case of the Missing School Nurse

By Peggy McDaniel, BSN, RN

I was amazed by a MarketWatch article this week about the overall lack of school nurses. According to the article, the National Association of School Nurses recommends that one nurse be available for every 750 well children. Many states operate with ratios greatly exceeding that number. For example, in 2009 Michigan had one nurse for every 4,836 children. To give credit where it is due, that same year Vermont provided one nurse for every 311 students. As a nurse, and a parent, I find this data frightening. Not only are there fewer trained professional nurses available to our children every year, but approximately 30% of American children suffer from chronic conditions such as type 1 or type 2 diabetes, asthma, and high blood pressure.

Having more nurses available to patients in an inpatient setting has been proven to promote better patient outcomes. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the same is probably true for school nurses.

Lousy timing. This acute shortage of school nurses could not come at a worse time. With more families than ever feeling the pinch of the recession, children are not immune to the oft-reported outcomes related to our current overall economic condition. Less money can […]

2016-11-21T13:16:09-05:00August 11th, 2010|Nursing|7 Comments
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Taking Away Choice — The Wrong Answer to Domestic Violence

By Meg Stone, MPH. Stone is the executive director of IMPACT Boston, an organization that works to prevent violence and abuse by giving people the tools to protect their safety and advocate for healthy relationships and sexual respect in their communities. A long-time domestic violence advocate with a degree in public health, she has, in her own words, “a strong interest in raising awareness of the issues facing women who present to emergency departments with injuries related to abuse. My professional background includes training nurses and first responders in asking about domestic violence and documenting incidents of abuse on medical records.”

This post is longer than our usual, but we thought it was worth running in entirety. The names and identifying details of those mentioned have been changed.

In the mid-1990s it was rare in most places for nurses and social workers to call domestic violence organizations when women came to the emergency department with injuries related to abuse. I only remember one call from a hospital social worker in the upstate New York town where I worked as an advocate at the local battered women’s program.

Carolyn, the director of the battered women’s service, called me at home on my day off. Nobody else was available, she said, so could I please please […]

2016-11-21T13:16:11-05:00August 10th, 2010|Nursing, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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Social Media and Nurses — Does Betty White Have a Point?

50 Social Media Icons/Ivan Walsh, via Flickr

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I’ve been extremely busy and have had trouble finding time to write a post for this blog. And it’s not enough just to write a post—we’ve got to think about what should go on Facebook and what should be Tweeted, whether we should do a mention in the eNewsletter and if a topic deserves a spot on AJN’s home page. All this communication takes time.

When she hosted Saturday Night Live, the inimitable Betty White acknowledged all the fans on Facebook who were the driving force behind the campaign to have her become the host. She confessed she didn’t know what Facebook was, and said, “Now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it seems like a huge waste of time.”

Facebook and Twitter sort of remind me of the Valentine’s Day card exchange in grammar school—everyone bought boxes of 100 cards (actually, more like small, cheap postcards) so you could give them out and, hopefully, get as many in return. It was about the number of cards you could collect—even if they were from classmates you didn’t care about or even disliked. You felt good if you had lots of cards and people saw that […]

2016-11-21T13:16:12-05:00August 9th, 2010|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|5 Comments
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Open Medical Records: A Question of Safety

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

We’ve all watched our health care provider writing or typing while we answered questions or described our symptoms. Before becoming a nurse I used to wonder what they were putting in my chart and if they got it right. And now that I am a nurse I can’t believe how often a medical assistant or nurse will take my vital signs and write them down without telling me what they are. How can it be possible that adults are kept from knowing their own or their children’s health information? Back when I worked on a pediatric floor my colleagues gasped in shock when I allowed a parent of one of my patients to look at his child’s chart. And I actually let them make me feel like I had done something wrong!

Last week this issue was the topic of a column by Dr. Pauline W. Chen in the New York Times, where two related blog posts (here and here) also received much reader commentary. The sudden flurry of interest in the subject was occasioned by an article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine detailing the preliminary findings of a study following a national project called OpenNotes, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in which “more than 100 primary care physicians and 25,000 of their patients will have access to personal medical records online for a 12-month period beginning in summer 2010.” Readers’ comments ranged from one extreme to the other, such […]

2016-11-21T13:16:18-05:00August 3rd, 2010|nursing perspective, patient engagement|3 Comments
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Watch Out for Dengue Fever in Travelers

By Diana J. Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief emeritus

You may have heard that in late July the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an advisory on dengue infection, which can lead to dengue fever or dengue hemorrhagic fever, noting that dengue is becoming an epidemic in tropical and subtropical areas of the world, with recent or ongoing outbreaks occurring in Puerto Rico; in Key West, Florida; and the Caribbean. It’s particularly important for nurses to be alert for symptoms of dengue fever among people who have returned from travel to tropical areas. Symptoms may include fever, eye pain, joint pain, rash, and bleeding. The greatest danger is from dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can lead to death.

For more on dengue infection (including its detection, treatment, and prevention), see the April 2008 article on the topic in AJN. And as always, please let us know here if you’ve encountered it recently yourself as a clinician—or traveler.

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2016-11-21T13:16:19-05:00August 2nd, 2010|Nursing|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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