Smokers Need Not Apply

By Peggy McDaniel, BSN, RN

Are you a smoker? If so, and you live in Chattanooga, TN, don’t even bother to apply for a job at Memorial Hospital, where being a smoker automatically disqualifies you. To ensure that job applicants are telling the truth, the hospital will subject them to drug tests—for nicotine! This new rule does not apply to current employees, but it does raise some interesting questions. The article notes that such requirements for hire could be a slippery slope on the way to other forms of discrimination. 

As unpopular as this may be, as a fellow health care worker I can see a lot of positives to such a trend. In a previous blog post I discussed nurses as role models for our patients. My focus was on obesity,  but I also mentioned smoking.  

Another recent article, this one in the UK’s Nursing Times, says nursing students in Europe should be encouraged to stop smoking. The article discusses an Italian study reporting that nursing students are twice as likely to be smokers than are members of the general public. Maybe this would be a good policy to promote in the US? The article raises some of the same points I had raised in my earlier post about role modeling and the ways our actions or choices may influence our effectiveness as educators.

In addition to the health benefits in being a nonsmoker, there are also huge cost savings. As with obesity, smoking affects the overall cost of our health care system. The Tennessee health department […]

2016-11-21T13:20:05-05:00January 20th, 2010|career, nursing perspective, students|9 Comments
Read More

In Medicine as in Aviation, Communication Breakdown Leads to Fatal Errors

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

Lately I’ve had communication on my brain. I’m always amazed that we get anything done in this world at the rate that messages can get lost in translation. For instance, I recently had a phone call from a mother of two girls who was upset about a medication error involving her 12-year-old daughter. While the mother was at work, the child came home from school with cold symptoms and a temperature of 102.5. The daughter called her mother and was told to take two tablets of Sudafed, which she did. About an hour later, the babysitter picked up the younger child, age nine, from school. Concerned that her sister was sleeping unusually soundly, the nine-year-old called her mother at work. Realizing that just giving her older daughter Sudafed hadn’t addressed her fever, she told her younger daughter to wake up her sister and have her take “two Advils.” 

A few hours later the mother came home from work. As she was about to give her daughter another dose of medication before bedtime, she remarked to the children that she wished she had a combination drug containing both Sudafed and Advil so that the girl wouldn’t have to swallow four separate pills. The nin- year-old informed her that they did in fact […]

2016-11-21T13:20:07-05:00January 19th, 2010|nursing perspective|3 Comments
Read More

Are We Trivializing Breast Cancer (and Demeaning Women) Even As We Raise Awareness?

Christine Moffa, MS, RN, clinical editor

I admit it. On January 7th my  Facebook status simply stated “Black.” Normally I’m not a joiner, but when I received a message from a FB friend that said the following, “This is fun put just the color of your bra in your status and send an email to the girls only and see if the guys can figure it out, it’s to raise breast cancer awareness,” I only paused for a moment. While a small part of me wondered if it was legit, I changed my status and forwarded the message on to other friends.

It seemed cute and harmless enough—until today, when I came across Donna Trussell’s article at Politics Daily. Her arguments—in which she interrogated her own feelings (as an ovarian cancer survivor) about our culture’s seeming obsession with breast cancer awareness, and distinguished between feel-good awareness and real action—made a lot of sense to me. The whole thing reminds me of the April 2009 cover of AJN (image below) featuring a piece from the Artful Bras Project by the Quilters of South Carolina, also created to raise breast cancer awareness.

We received a lot of letters about that one, both positive and negative. Either way, it does get people talking. Is doing something as silly (and, to some, either sexist or demeaning) as this justified in the name of increasing awareness about a disease?

2016-11-21T13:20:09-05:00January 18th, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment
Read More

“They Call Us Doctor, and We Call Them By Their Names”

Just stumbled on a blog post written by a first-year resident who calls himself “Anonymous Doc.” He raises a good question about why nurses and doctors are referred to in such different ways:

I don’t think I’ve talked about this before, but the doctor/nurse divide is weird. One of my intern friends called me the other night and said there’s a nurse he likes, and in theory wants to ask her out, but doesn’t think he should. It would be awkward, he’s like her superior… he doesn’t feel comfortable doing anything. And maybe he’s right. But the whole dynamic is weird. They call us doctor, and we call them by their names– and sometimes not even. At one of the hospitals, there’s this strange custom where the nurses all go by Miss or Mister and their first names. So I’m Dr. Lastname and they’re Miss Jenny or Mister Steve. It’s bizarre. Miss Jenny sounds like a kindergarten teacher. Maybe. And some of the residents use these names when they talk about the nurses to each other, like– “did you give the order to Miss Amber?” “did you tell Miss Jeanette?” Are we children? I feel like we’re colleagues, and we should all just call each other by our first names. Like colleagues do. Patients can call us Dr. Whatever, but I don’t feel like I need the nurses to treat me like a superior, and I also don’t want to treat them like they’re my nursery school teacher.

Share this:

2016-11-21T13:20:10-05:00January 15th, 2010|career|10 Comments
Read More

Web Crawl: Unprofessional Workplace Behavior Irks Nurses; APNs Seek Primary Care Rights; Whistleblowers on Trial; More

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I spend a lot of time checking various web sites for news or new information nurses need to know, for interesting items for blog posts or articles, or for trends that may be coming down the pike. Here’s some “food-for-thought” items I found in my recent web crawls:

On nursingworld.org, the American Nurses Association, in a recent poll, asked site visitors if they had been “a target of unprofessional behavior” in the workplace. A startling 82% of respondents said yes. While “unprofessional behavior” was not defined (when you think about it, it could be any number of things, ranging from gossip and practical jokes to bullying and unwanted sexual advances), the fact that so many people feel this way deserves further exploration. What about you? What have you seen on your unit that might fit this category of “unprofessional behavior”?

Vindy.com, an Ohio news outlet, reports that advanced practice nurses (APNs) in the state want more recognition and freedom to practice. According to the article, the Ohio Association of Advanced Practice Nurses (OAAPN) is seeking legislators to remove restrictions that prevent them from heading the medical home models of primary care. Currently, physicians must be the designated head of the medical home. (See our article on this.)  Jacalyn Golden of OAAPN said APNs “have proved themselves since they began providing primary care in 1965.” Amen.

Remember the “Sentosa Nurses,” the nurses from the Philippines who became embroiled in prosecution after they quit en masse from New York nursing […]

2016-11-21T13:20:12-05:00January 14th, 2010|Nursing|4 Comments
Read More

Comment ground rules

1. Please be respectful.
2. We moderate all comments.

Content disclaimer

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.
Go to Top