AJN in September: Pain Management in Opioid Use Disorder, STIs in the U.S., Teaching Vs. Unit Needs

AJN0915.Cover.OnlineOn this month’s cover, perianesthesia nurse Carolyn Benigno helps prepare a young patient for surgery at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. The photo, the first-place winner of AJN’s 2015 Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work photo contest, shows Benigno practicing “Caring through Play.” The art of working at a pediatric hospital, she says, is “learning how to play with children so that part of your nursing care is play.” Such play can both distract a child in the moment and help the child cope with the disorienting experience of hospitalization.

For another piece on how nurses try to make hospitalization less stressful for children, see this month’s Cultivating Quality article, “Improving Pediatric Temperature Measurement in the ED.”

Some other articles of note in the September issue:

CE Feature: “Acute Pain Management for Inpatients with Opioid Use Disorder.” Inpatients diagnosed with opioid use disorder (OUD) commonly experience acute pain during hospitalization and may require opioids for pain management. But misconceptions about opioids and negative attitudes toward patients with OUD may lead to undermedication, unrelieved pain, and unnecessary suffering. This article reviews the current relevant literature and dispels common myths about opioids and OUD. […]

2016-11-21T13:02:02-05:00September 2nd, 2015|career, Ethics, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Revisiting Katrina’s Lessons 10 Years Out, from a Nursing Perspective

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

Hurricane Katrina Hits New Orleans, August 29, 2005/ Wikimedia Commons Hurricane Katrina Hits New Orleans, August 29, 2005/ Wikimedia Commons

This past week we’ve seen many media retrospectives on the devastation Hurricane Katrina visited on the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. I remember it vividly—as AJN’s news director at the time, I cut short a Labor Day vacation and flew to Mississippi on September 10 to report firsthand on how relief efforts were progressing.

I visited the emergency shelter staged at the Meridian Naval Air Station and then drove as far as I could south from Meridian toward the Gulf of Mexico. I got as far as Hattiesburg, Mississippi, before I had to turn around because there were no open gas stations and my gas tank was at half-empty. The devastation along the highway was remarkable; trees were completely flattened and debris of all sorts was scattered about as if a giant trash can had been overturned. And this was still about 70 miles inland from the Gulf.

Over the following months and then years, AJN published a number of articles and reports on health-related issues that arose from Hurricane Katrina (see the list below). We highlighted the heroics of many nurses who found ways to deliver care with few resources, discussed […]

2016-11-21T13:02:05-05:00August 31st, 2015|career, Ethics, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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In a Changing Health Care Landscape, Narrowing Options for Older RNs?

Christine Contillo, RN, lives in New Jersey and has been a staff nurse at a university health service in New York City for eight years.

Fork_in_the_road_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1355424I’ve been a practicing nurse for 36 years, working continuously while raising three kids. After first trying a few other jobs, I entered nursing expecting a profession that would give me emotional fulfillment, some flexibility, and a good wage. Nursing has fit the bill for me on every level.

Throughout my career I’ve made every effort to keep advancing my skills. I’ve earned annual continuing education credits as well as attended national conferences and gained two certifications. The titles I’ve held have included supervisor, coordinator, and nurse educator. For the last eight years I’ve held a full-time position that I love in a primary care in a medical home setting. There I’ve had both an independent and a provider support role. I’m adept at use of the EHR, vaccines, triage, finding and booking specialists, travel health, patient education, removing sutures and dressing wounds, among other things.

However, I have a 3.5-hour commute each day. As I get older, my time has become much more precious. With college loans for my three kids finally paid off and my husband’s full encouragement, last year I began to look for a job closer to home.

I envisioned something similar to what I was already good at, as part […]

2016-11-21T13:02:07-05:00August 21st, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|4 Comments
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Measuring a Nurse’s Career Through BLS

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, is an oncology nurse navigator and writes a monthly post for this blog.

ParadisiBLSCertificationCardI was a child when I first heard the term CPR. My father, a volunteer fire captain in our community, had newly certified that day at drill. From the head of our dinner table he proclaimed, “It’s a terrible thing to have to do, but everyone should know how.”

He was right.

It feels as though I’ve known basic life support (BLS; sometimes still referred to as CPR) all my life, but I believe I was 16 years old when I first took a provider course, long before I knew I’d become a nurse.

Since then, as a former pediatric intensive care nurse, I have performed a lot of CPR, and a related professional compliment received during a pediatric resuscitation rests bittersweetly in my heart.

It was one of those codes that begins in the ED, and transfers into the PICU because survival is unlikely. The cause was cardiac. As I did compressions, and my colleague, a respiratory therapist, hand-ventilated the child, blood gases were drawn. The attending cardiologist looked over the results, and told us, “It’s too bad a perfect blood gas isn’t enough to save a life. The two of you are performing superb CPR.”

He was right. It wasn’t enough.

That was nearly 20 years ago. Basic life support recertification is required every two years. Now […]

2016-11-21T13:02:08-05:00August 19th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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On Nursing Identity: What We Can Learn from African Nurses’ Oral Histories

 By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Port of Mauritius by Iqbal Osman, via Flickr Port of Mauritius by Iqbal Osman, via Flickr

“I have chosen this profession and nobody can take it away from me.”—Sophie Makwangwala, study participant

In the summer of 2009, at the International Council of Nurses (ICN) Quadren­nial Congress in Durban, South Africa, a small group met to discuss collaborating on joint history projects. At that meeting, several African leaders of pro­fessional nursing associations reported that their expertise had long gone unrecognized. Seeking to have the stories of African nursing history told, they pro­posed interviews with other retired nurse leaders. Barbara Mann Wall, an American nurse researcher who was in the room that day, found herself intrigued.

The study. In keeping with Braun’s tenet that “indigenous research should be led, de­signed, controlled, and reported by indigenous peo­ple,” Wall first trained three of the African nurse leaders in the oral history method, aided by a grant from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Then the team embarked on the study reported on in this month’s original research CE, “ ‘I Am A Nurse’: Oral Histories of African Nurses.” Here’s an overview: […]

2017-07-27T14:39:53-04:00August 17th, 2015|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|2 Comments
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