What Obama Told Us (Nurses) in the West Wing Yesterday About Health Care Reform
Nurses do know the importance of these elements of health care reform.
Obama Follows Up Reform Speech By Addressing Nurses (including AJN’s Diana Mason) at White House
Said President Obama this morning, to a White House audience of nurse leaders (including Diana Mason, AJN‘s editor-in-chief emeritus): “You’re the bedrock of our medical system. . . Few people understand . . . as you do why we need reform.” Click the image above to go to a page where you can watch the full speech, and be sure to check back here for Mason’s account of her visit to the White House.
Nurses Express Safety Concerns About H1N1 Vaccine
By Jacob Molyneux, blog editor
Nurse blogger Not Nurse Ratched has written a post on her decision not to get the H1N1 vaccine shot until she is more convinced of its safety.
I’m just urging caution against the knee-jerk fear reaction that is, no doubt, going to make hordes of people swarm out to clamor for this vaccine. I’ll be watching for more data on it and might modify my decision, but for now I’m going to just say no.
Judging from responses to a recent post we ran on the topic (“cancel my subscription” appeared more than once), the loudest clamor may be from those who are driven by fear of the vaccine rather than fear of the H1N1 virus. In the post in question, Doug Olsen, a nurse ethicist, examined the ethical side of the question of whether or not nurses should get vaccinated.
(Whether or not you agree with Olsen’s guarded conclusion in favor of vaccination, his post demonstrated how a professional ethicist uses a set of concepts as tools—not to come up with a definitive answer that can be called “right” or “wrong” but instead to examine the moral dimensions of a decision. We hope that some of the concepts he used will be seen as tools to help nurses make their own informed decisions.)
By way of update, here’s an addendum we received from Olsen that addresses some of the concerns about vaccine safety expressed in the various comments:
Any obligation of nurses to protect the patient by getting flu vaccine depends on trust in the science and in the system […]
A Girl, a Suitcase–a Nurse Who Can’t Forget
"Gina must be in her 20s today, but I still see her as the little girl sitting quietly at the cafeteria table waiting for someone to come back to her."
“The nurse left work at five o’clock. . . .”: Three-Minute Fiction at NPR
By James M. Stubenrauch, senior editor
Here’s something AJN’s readers might be interested in: National Public Radio has been running a short-short fiction contest—stories that can be read aloud in three minutes or less—and posting some of the better ones on its Web site, here. In Round Two of the contest, there was one extra rule that writers had to observe: the story had to begin with the sentence “The nurse left work at five o’clock.” The winner will be selected by James Wood, book critic at The New Yorker, any day now.
I especially enjoyed “Working Hours” by Natalie Miller, which begins: “The nurse left work at five o’clock. My heart stopped beating at 5:01.” It’s wildly inventive writing, but I wonder, would this situation occur in hospitals today?
Also, there are some excellent stories that have nothing to do with nursing among the Round One entries (and, by the way, I notice some people have made use of the comments section to post their own short-short stories—hmmm). Happy quick-quick reading!