career Archives - Page 27 of 68

Revisiting Reality Shock – What’s Changed for New Nurses?

julie kertesz/ via flickr creative common

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last month, we highlighted on Facebook a blog post I had written in 2010, “New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?” (It seemed timely in terms of all the June graduations.)

I wrote that original post in response to a study that had just been published in Nursing Outlook (here’s the abstract) describing the experiences of new nurses. Generally, these newbies felt harried, unprepared, overworked, and unsupported—all similar concerns voiced by nurses in Marlene Kramer’s 1974 book, Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing. (Here’s AJN’s 1975 review of the book. It will be free for a month; note that you have to click the PDF link at the article landing page to read it.)

My post back in 2009 noted how nothing much seemed to have changed since the publication of Kramer’s book. Now, once again, this post has generated many comments, a number of them on our Facebook page as well as on the original blog post.

Here are a few. I’ll start with Facebook:

I’m almost a 20yr RN and have experienced [this] in a new job. I’ve developed skills to deal with this over the course of my career, so it doesn’t impact me like it […]

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Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2016-11-21T13:04:14-05:00July 28th, 2014|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, students|10 Comments

The Ethics of a Nurse’s Refusal to Force-Feed Guantanamo Hunger-Strikers

Douglas Olsen is an associate professor at the Michigan State University College of Nursing in East Lansing and a contributing editor of AJN, where he regularly writes about ethical issues in nursing.

Nasal tubes, gravity feeding bags, and the liquid nutrient Ensure used in Guantanamo force-feeding/ image via Wikimedia Commons

The Miami Herald reported this week that a U.S. Navy nurse and officer refused to take part in force-feeding hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s much we still don’t know about this story, but the force-feeding of prisoners at Guantanamo has been a contentious issue for some time. The practice has been compared by some to torture, and ethicists in the medical literature have urged the physicians involved to refuse to participate, while the U.S. government and President Barack Obama defend the practice on humanitarian grounds of preventing the deaths of the detainees.

Whether or not one feels that nurse participation in the force-feeding is justified, this officer, whose identity has not been released, appears to deserve the profession’s praise for taking a moral stand in an extraordinarily difficult circumstance. All nurses have the […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:04:16-05:00July 18th, 2014|career, Ethics, Nursing, Patients|10 Comments

Flight Nursing Notes – The Feel of a Homecoming

Observations of an experienced ICU nurse and long-time AJN blogger who recently made the transition to flight nursing.

Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, ATCN, TNCC, is an occasional contributor to this blog. Some details have been changed to protect patient privacy.

“We’ve been married for 58 years,” my patient’s wife says. “Fifty-eight years…”

She turns her attention from me and gazes out the window of the plane.

We are on a medevac flight, 35,000 feet over the Pacific en route to an urban, American hospital near “home.” Her husband is being transferred to receive aggressive care for a grave illness.

We collected him hours earlier from a hospital on a foreign island. Local paramedics picked my partner and me up from the barren, windy tarmac. As we sped to the hospital in the back of an ambulance with a cracked windshield, the driver turned to warn us that we were going to “the worst hospital in the city.”

“It’s open-air,” he told us, as he dodged mopeds and swerved through narrow, crowded streets.

This didn’t surprise me. I’d been forewarned that hospital conditions on many of these remote islands could be shocking when compared to American standards. It was something I’d been curious to see firsthand.

Yet when we picked our patient up, we found him in a small and clean room in an intensive care unit. Despite the paramedic’s prediction and the […]

Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, CFRN2016-11-21T13:04:17-05:00July 14th, 2014|career, Nursing|3 Comments

As Another June Is Forgotten, Some Notes on Nurses and Normandy

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

A pause before the 4th of July: Nurses were at D-Day too.

Nurses coming ashore at Normandy/AJN archive

Last month, there were a number of D-Day remembrances in the media—June 6 was the 70th anniversary of the 1944 Allied forces landing along the beaches of Normandy and what many believe to have been the single largest tactical maneuver ever launched.

I was especially interested in the D-Day events—I’ll be visiting the Normandy beaches in October. My father was a World War II army veteran and landed at Normandy, though not in the first wave. He arrived days later with Patton’s 9th Armored Division after the beaches had been secured. (His unit would go on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and finally into Germany after securing the Bridge at Remagen, the only bridge across the Rhine River into Germany not destroyed during the German retreat.) AJN archive

One thing I was surprised to learn is that nurses landed at Normandy and other invasion beaches within only a few days of the first wave. The photos here are from the AJN archives—the above photo shows nurses landing at Normandy. And the one to the right predates […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2016-11-21T13:04:20-05:00July 3rd, 2014|career, nursing history|6 Comments

A Child’s Story, or Why She Became a Nurse

Illustration by Anne Horst. All rights reserved.

Day in and day out, a child lives in fear. Her stomach often twists in knots of pain for hours before the pain fades away. The doctors can find no medical reason for the pain. Her mother angrily accuses her of faking it, of being more trouble than she’s worth. The child is often told how stupid she is. Though her father sometimes protects her, at times his medication doesn’t work and he transforms from a caring protective father into a crazed abusive one. Even when the child is unharmed, she stays in a constant state of panic as soon as she walks in her front door.

That’s the opening paragraph of this month’s Reflections essay. “A Child’s Story” is a tough read. It’s about child abuse, helplessness, the will to endure, about those who help and those who don’t. In the end, it’s a hopeful story, despite everything. The story is also a reminder of just how much the decision to become a nurse means to some people. Here’s a brief excerpt, but we hope you’ll read the entire short essay (click on the article title above).—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:04:25-05:00June 30th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|2 Comments