Making It Safe: Skills to Promote Healthy Conversation at Work

Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr. Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr.

Medora McGinnis, RN, has written several previous posts for this blog. She is now a pediatric RN at St. Mary’s Hospital in the Bon Secours Health System, Richmond, Virginia, as well as a freelance writer.

What makes communication at work feel safe? We can all identify situations that “go south”—we feel instantly uncomfortable in the work environment (or anywhere, really) if we are accused, blamed, insulted, or overlooked. It’s easy to recognize when our communication is not safe, not going well, and not professional. So what makes it safe?

Effective communication can only take place when all parties feel safe; we must feel comfortable sharing our clinical insights without fear of the reaction we might get from the other party. While we can’t always know what their reaction will be, by learning to make it safe we can learn to talk with anyone about anything. New nurses in my hospital go through a six-month “RN residency” program in which we meet once a month for education, journaling exercises, and sharing. The book Crucial Conversations: Tips for Talking When Stakes Are High was used in our training to help us further develop our communication skills in the workplace. As a first-year nurse myself, I’ve found that some of the book’s ideas have played a big role in my learning curve.

Mistake #1: Watering down the content so the message doesn’t get across.

When […]

2016-11-21T13:08:00-05:00March 27th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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The Real Reason Why Older Nurses Don’t Retire

By Julianna Paradisi. All rights reserved. Snow Tops/ by Julianna Paradisi

Julianna Paradisi, who blogs at JParadisi RN and elsewhere, works as an infusion nurse in outpatient oncology. Her artwork has appeared several times in AJN, and her essay, “The Wisdom of Nursery Rhymes,” was published in the February 2011 issue.

I hate to break this news to new graduate nurses struggling to find jobs, but the real reason that older nurses don’t retire isn’t—as you may have been led to believe—the struggling economy. The reason is that a large percentage of retirement-aged nurses enjoy working. As a middle-generation nurse, I’m coming to grips with this reality myself.

Many of my longtime colleagues are old enough to retire. When they do, they often retain on-call status. They never really go away. It’s weird to attend a retirement party for a coworker and then see her or him again the next day at work, helping out with a special project for their manager.

This trend among older nurses was also in evidence at a meeting I recently attended. Most of those present were nurse managers. Although a few were younger than me, most were older, sporting hipster eyeglass frames and sophisticated bob haircuts that left their natural silver.

These men and women are a […]

2017-01-26T12:35:09-05:00March 25th, 2013|career, Nursing|26 Comments
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‘To Profess’ – A Poem on the Passing of Donna Diers, PhD, RN, FAAN

Diers_DonnaDonna Diers, 1938–2013

I’ve seen several notices about the February 23rd death of this true “living legend” of nursing. The terms used to describe her or her contributions to nursing include “champion of nursing research,” “advocate,” “captivating storyteller,” “caring mentor,” and “inspirational figurehead.” I’d add unpretentious, wise, warm, and witty. I can’t say I was a friend—our dealings were because she was on AJN’s editorial board and its journal oversight committee. But I felt her warmth and support and appreciated her encouragement and suggestions, always given in a straight-talking, to-the-point fashion. I’ve saved one particularly encouraging e-mail she sent—she always had the right words.

There will undoubtedly be many tributes to Donna—and deservedly so. We will have one in our April issue, which is already at the printer. And here’s a tribute from the Yale School of Nursing, where she was the former dean and still teaching until just before her death; it lists her many accomplishments.

The following poem by Jeanne LeVasseur, a nursing professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, will appear in our May issue, but we were so taken with it that we want to share it with you now.—Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief


To Profess
By Jeanne LeVasseur, PhD, MFA, APRN, RN

—In memoriam, Donna Diers

On the day she died, most of us didn’t yet know,
like Icarus falling from his century
the wax wings disappearing in the green water,
just Daedalus weeping, it took time for that great circle to ripple out.
And […]

2016-11-21T13:08:11-05:00March 4th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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The Depression Project

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May (2012 issue) of AJN. She currently has an essay appearing in The Examined Life Journal.

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons

Lately, as a long-time runner, I can’t help but draw parallels between working on a nursing research project and training for a distance race set far in the future. Especially in the middle of a long run, when frazzled edges smooth out and clarity settles over me, the similarities between the two are striking. Both require inspiration and a goal, fluid planning and accommodation for the unexpected, and patience.

I casually refer to the nursing research project I’m involved in as “The Depression Project.” It was borne of concern among the ICU nurses about the mental states of the trauma patients in our unit. As the bedside care providers, we often come to know our patients very well; we don’t just care for these people, we sincerely care, and so we’re troubled when we observe, time and again, trauma patients who seem to lose the motivation to engage in their recoveries. They become flat and despondent; they lose hope.

It’s clear to the nurses that while the physical injuries sustained present enormous challenges, the emotional toll is sometimes just as debilitating—yet underestimated. And so we devised a study to illustrate the correlation of depression and recovery.

It’s […]

2016-11-21T13:08:35-05:00January 9th, 2013|career, Nursing, nursing research, patient experience, Patients|4 Comments
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Why Aren’t There More Men in Nursing?

Male nurse action figure/ gcfairch, flickr Male nurse action figure/ gcfairch, flickr

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

Men have served in nursing roles since at least the third century, when a special order of men was said to have existed to care for plague victims in Alexandria. And various religious orders seem to have had groups of men devoted to nursing tasks during the Middle Ages.

More recently, a number of men served as nurses or in nursing roles during the U.S. Civil War—Walt Whitman, who extensively visited wounded soldiers during the Civil War, has sometimes been described as one, though he mostly focused on tasks like writing letters for illiterate soldiers, bringing them special foods and necessary items, and providing companionship. (See our article on Whitman from our 100th anniversary issue of October, 2000.)

There were schools of nursing for men since the early 1900s. Last year, we published “My Grandfather’s Unpublished Manuscript” (August, 2012), a wonderful story of how the author (a nurse) found an article describing her grandfather’s experiences during his education and nursing career, which began with graduation from nursing school in 1929.

There were several early articles about male nurses in AJN—the oldest one I found was from March, 1924: “A School of Nursing for Men,” by Kenneth T. Crummer, described the school of nursing for men at the Pennsylvania Hospital and its founding 10 years earlier, in 1914. The final sentence reads, “Who knows […]

2016-11-21T13:08:36-05:00January 8th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|22 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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