Voice of Dissension: When Nurse Teamwork and Patient Safety Diverge

ParadisiIllustrationDissension Dissension (from the series Pareidolia), charcoal & graphite on paper, 12″ x 9,”
2012 by Julianna Paradisi

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, writes a monthly post for this blog and works as an infusion nurse in outpatient oncology. The illustration of this post is by the author.

The term “voice” gets thrown around a lot these days, usually in reference to creative content. Visual artists, writers, musicians, and actors rise to their unique place in the art world on the originality of their voice, not merely for mastery and talent.

In nursing, voice is important too. Hospitals spend a small fortune in paid staff hours for team-building meetings or retreats for nurses to smooth the rough edges of staff members, reducing friction among unit nurses with the ultimate goals of nurse retention and improved patient care. While these are admirable goals, I’m beginning to wonder if too much emphasis on team building may also diminish a nurse’s unique voice, thereby inadvertently interfering with patient safety? A team is only as strong as its individual members. […]

2016-11-21T13:05:33-05:00January 29th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, patient safety|4 Comments
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Patient Decisions: When You’re Just Not Up to Making the Call

By Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP, clinical managing editor

Photo by the author Photo by the author

For most patients and in most clinical situations, decision making is and should be a shared process between the patient and the clinician (and often the family). But there are some cases when we, expert clinicians versed in scientific and experiential knowledge, need to make a decision for the patient—not out of some paternalistic idea of our authority or superiority, but because the patient really wants or needs us to take on that burden.

I was six months pregnant with my second child. The pregnancy had gone smoothly, which was a blessing after having delivered my first child 10 weeks premature following two weeks spent in a tertiary care center. That pregnancy had been problematic from the beginning—early bleeding, and then a hemorrhage at five months, at which time they’d diagnosed me with placenta previa. It was one of those pregnancies where you were thankful for each additional day that brought you closer to the nine-month mark.

But this time, everything was going smoothly—no bleeding or cramps, an active baby that ultrasounds confirmed was growing well . . . until one morning in February, when I started with cramps that progressed to pain and a lot of pressure. An hour later, I was in the labor and delivery […]

2016-11-21T13:05:37-05:00January 17th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, patient engagement, patient experience|1 Comment
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AJN 2013 Book of the Year Awards: Winners in 19 Categories

AJN 2013 Book of the Year Awards 

BOTYSince 1969, AJN has been announcing its annual list of the best in nursing publishing. The most valuable texts of each year are chosen by AJN’s panel of judges. Only books published between August of the prior year and August of the award year are eligible. To quote AJN‘s editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy, our Book of the Year awards, announced each year in our January issue, “are sought after by authors and publishers . . . the awards give us the opportunity to acknowledge high-quality publications.”

Below you can find the 2013 first-place winner for each of the 19 categories. To see a listing of all winners (there are 2nd and 3rd place winners for each category as well), please click this link. […]

2016-11-21T13:05:40-05:00January 8th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Bed Bath: The First Day of the Rest of Her Life

BedBathIllustration“Bed Bath,” the January Reflections column by pediatric nurse practitioner Kathleen Hughes, is a description of giving a first bed bath as a nurse after many years working in other professions. It’s not the first essay we’ve ever published about giving a bed bath, but it’s wise and meditative and well worth a read. Here’s a small section of this short essay, but please read the whole thing.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

An Ivy League degree and 15 years of teaching and writing did not prepare me any better than my mostly 20-something counterparts in the ways of giving a bed bath to a 72-year-old man I’d never met. What might be different for me is that I have known many kinds of professional challenges. What might also be different is that I have lived enough longer to have attended my father’s hospital-bound illness and death, and to have given birth to and cared for two young children. And so when I washed this man, I was washing my father, I was washing my children; I became one of those people who cared for us. Though giving a bed bath is not anything like lecturing to AP students on Faulkner, or writing a newspaper article on gun control or university library funding or modern exorcisms, I am not sure that either of those tasks made me hunker in a corner for five minutes, gathering myself before striding into the room. I’ve […]

2016-11-21T13:05:41-05:00January 6th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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The Not Good Nurse – Some Dark Holiday Reading

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

GoodNurseHaving some down time over the holidays can be a good chance to catch up on some reading. Because so much of my work entails reading manuscripts submitted to AJN about nursing practice and research, I look for my leisure reading to be something not connected to nursing.

Well, the book I recently read—a quick, engaging read—was about nursing, sort of. The book was Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder, the story of nurse-turned-serial-killer Charles Cullen. While I find the title to be a bit sensationalist, the book is not. There’s no real answer as to why Cullen did what he did—Cullen apparently had a miserable childhood, was often a target of bullies, had failed marriages and made many suicide attempts to gain sympathy or attention. Graeber doesn’t really seek to answer the why of what Cullen did but instead focuses on his behavior and relationships.

The chilling aspect of the story is how easy it was for Cullen to get away with his killing through the use of essential technology relied on by nurses for the care of hospital patients. The medication and computer systems that he manipulated to cover his tracks also eventually allowed an intrepid nurse colleague to help police prove their case—only a nurse knowledgeable about the day-to-day use of the systems could uncover the […]

2016-11-21T13:05:42-05:00January 2nd, 2014|career, nursing perspective|7 Comments
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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.
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