Psychodrama, and Dreams: Art of Nursing’s December Poet

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“Wife two weeps, leaves a trail of tissues, // stamps her foot, cries no one loves her,“ reports the narrator of “Psychodrama Session.”  The poem, featured in this month’s Art of Nursing, offers a vivid look at what might happen when a man in psychotherapy talks about his past; read it here.  (You’ll need to click again on “Article as PDF.”)  Though her characters are imagined, writer Joan Mazza knows the world she’s writing about. She is a licensed psychotherapist and certified sex therapist as well as a speaker and writing coach.

Mazza has been published in numerous literary and mainstream magazines, from The MacGuffin and The Hudson Review to Writer’s Digest and, yes, Playgirl. She has also written several books on the uses of dreams, including Dream Back Your Life: A Practical Guide to Dreams, Daydreams, and Fantasies (Perigree Trade, 2000), described as a dream-based approach to self-improvement. For more information, visit her Web site.

And if you’re a poet or a visual artist, please consider submitting to Art of Nursing. Read this blog post for details. Guidelines can be found here; and if you still have questions, feel free to write to the Art of Nursing coordinator (me) at sylvia.foley@wolterskluwer.com.

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2016-11-21T13:20:33-05:00December 17th, 2009|Nursing|1 Comment
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Poor Assessment of Nursing Home Residents’ Pain — What Can Be Done?

A recent study sought to find out whether relatives and caregivers (proxies) understood residents’ pain well enough to assist in pain assessment and to discover what factors affected their judgments of pain. The findings showed, however, that their reports didn’t consistently match the pain ratings of nursing home residents themselves.

It’s particularly difficult to assess pain in cognitively impaired nursing home residents. This means that there’s a lot of suffering that goes untreated. This AJN article in the December issue discusses the findings of a new study on the topic and offers some recommendations we obtained from the study authors. Here’s another excerpt:

The authors suggest that pain management in nursing homes could be improved through caregiver education, including the implementation of pain assessment education in combination with treatment. They recommend basic training for nurses and nursing assistants on pain, pain behavior, and pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic pain treatment, such as “massage, applying warmth, mobility[, and] distractions with music or story telling.” They also suggest that “treatment effects could be determined more easily using a pain observation scale.”

So check out the article, and also let us know what else can we do to more accurately assess the pain of nursing home residents.

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2016-11-21T13:20:34-05:00December 16th, 2009|nursing research, pain management|0 Comments
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Nursing Yet Again the Most Trusted Profession. So What?

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

I was catching up on my reading over the weekend and came across a press release issued December 9 by the ANA (American Nurses Association). It noted that “[f]or the eighth consecutive year, nurses have been voted the most trusted profession in America according to Gallup’s annual survey of professions for their honesty and ethical standards. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe nurses’ honesty and ethical standards are either ‘high’ or ‘very high.'”

Laudable for sure, but I keep wondering: does this matter to anyone but us? In the past eight years, has this designation helped nurses get to the policy table? Has it made key decision-makers realize that in addition to being trustworthy, nurses are also smart, skilled professionals who can be the key to cost-effective, quality care?

It’s really amazing (in an appalling sort of way): the groups among those with the lowest trust ratings—politicians and lawyers—dominate when it comes to making key decisions about health care (and about everything, actually). And we wonder why things are the way they are?

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2016-11-21T13:20:35-05:00December 15th, 2009|career, nursing perspective|3 Comments
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Required Reading: Nurses as Champions of Patient Safety

Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr

By Diana J. Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief emeritus of AJN. Mason is a member of the National Advisory Committee of Kaiser Health News.

I was delighted to see Kaiser Health News publish a superb commentary by nurse researcher Mary Naylor and health economist Mark Pauly on why nurses are the key to patient safety and quality, the barriers that interfere with nurses being these sentinels, and what can be done to address these barriers. It should be required reading by all policymakers, CEOs of health care organizations, and trustees.

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2018-03-13T10:44:44-04:00December 11th, 2009|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
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What We Heard from the Leaders of the New National Nursing Union

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

As we noted earlier this week, several major nursing unions have united to form a “superunion.” The National Nurses United (NNU) brings over 150,000 nurses together by combining the California Nurses Association (CNA)/National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) with the Massachusetts Nursing Association (MNA) and some members of the United American Nurses (UAN).

There are three co-presidents: Karen Higgins (from the MNA), Jean Ross (from the UAN), and Deborah Burger (from the CNA/NNOC).

Ross told me this:

  • The CNA/NNOC will cease behaving as a national union and, like the MNA, be a state union; both will be affiliates of the new NNU.
  • The UAN will cease to exist as a national union; those state associations that were members will automatically be members of NNU, unless they decide not to.
  • NNU will focus on health care reform, will advocate for a single-payer system, and will seek to organize all non-union staff nurses in the country

Ross had this to say as well: “People in this country have been waiting for a long time for nurses to come forward to make true health care reform a reality.”

Co-President Deborah Burger told me that NNU will pursue the main objectives of a “massive organizing campaign to organize all nurses nationally” and an aggressive “social justice” agenda focused on advocating for a single-payer health care system. They will also work for passage of federal staffing ratios legislation introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer.

Said Burger, […]

2016-11-21T13:20:40-05:00December 10th, 2009|career, health care policy|0 Comments
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