What You May Not Know About Nurse Licensure

This month’s Legal Clinic installment in AJN is called “Common Misconceptions About Nurse Licensure.” Author Edie Brous, a nurse and attorney, lists these misconceptions:

  • 1. Nursing boards are nursing advocates. Not so, says Brous; they’re there to protect the public. “Because nurses care for vulnerable populations, the state that issues a nursing license has a social contract with the public to ensure that the licensee is qualified, competent, and ethical.”
  • 2. Private Conduct Isn’t Relevant to One’s Performance in a Professional Capacity. In fact, it can matter to a nursing board. The reasoning: “Conduct that reflects questionable judgment, impairment, or lapses in moral character may suggest to the board that a nurse poses a potential threat to the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” Ever neglect payment of student loans, child support, or taxes; have a substance abuse problem; commit a crime? It might be relevant.
  • 3. Disciplinary action taken by a state pertains only to that state. Not so: there’s a computerized system called Nursys (Nurse System) where nursing boards enter actions they take against a nurse and learn about actions taken elsewhere.
  • 4. Licensure is a right. “Rights are entitlements that are considered inherent and inalienable so they cannot be revoked, but privileges are granted by the state and are therefore conditional. As such, a nursing license may be restricted or revoked upon determination that the license holder poses a risk to the public.”

The article goes into more detail […]

2016-11-21T13:09:05-05:00October 19th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|9 Comments
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When a Fellow Nurse Abuses Drugs on the Job

. . . the nurse wasn’t anywhere on the floor. I started looking around, asking other nurses. My frustration grew when I realized that something about the entire floor felt wrong. The entire night shift had disappeared. My chest tightened and I started to worry about what had happened at the hospital last night.

That’s a short excerpt from the Reflections essay in the October issue of AJN, “A Good Nurse.” It’s by oncology nurse Theresa Brown, who happens to also have a new column out this week at the New York Times Opinionator blog. Never one to shy away from sensitive topics, in this essay she takes on the shock and betrayal in learning a fellow nurse has been abusing drugs on the job. Click the link above or the image on the right to read the whole short essay (click through to the PDF version for the best reading experience). We welcome your responses here, of course.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor
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2016-11-21T13:09:12-05:00September 28th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Practically a Nurse: Life as a New Graduate RN

By Medora McGinnis, RN, whose last post for this blog was “Don’t Cling to Tradition: A Nursing Student’s Call for Realism, Respect.” Medora is now a pediatric RN at St. Mary’s Hospital in the Bon Secours Health System, Richmond, Virginia, as well as a freelance writer. As a nursing student she was the Imprint Editor for the National Student Nurses Association.

Life as a new graduate RN has been . . . confusing. While my peers seem to have it all together, for the last five months since graduating I’ve been perplexed—what do I do with myself, if I don’t have to stress out and study everyday? Well, of course I have my five kids to keep me busy, an amazing new job as a pediatric RN, and my husband who almost forgot what I look like.

Still, I feel like I should be cramming for something, memorizing something, or at least triple-tasking. I’m stressed that I’m not stressing out. Maybe I just dreamt that I graduated . . .

Here is a little of my backstory: I graduated in May from a three-year diploma program, as part of the very last class in that historic Virginia program, Bon Secours Memorial College of Nursing. It is now a four-year BSN program. They are affiliated with the large health […]

2016-11-21T13:09:13-05:00September 25th, 2012|career, Nursing, students|2 Comments
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Passion and Fear: Signs of a Kindred Nursing Spirit

Florence Nightingale in Crimean War, from Wikipedia Commons

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May issue of AJN.

“It’s not that we want something bad to happen; we just want to be there when it does.”

One of my colleagues recently saw that phrase on a T-shirt, and it perfectly echoes the sentiment of the ICU nurses I work with. We’re prepared for crises, primed for instability—and the lower acuity patients who have been populating the ICU lately leave many of us restless and discontented. We start to miss the dramatic cases, the incredible saves and miracles; we miss using our skills. We do see the irony of being in the awkward position of wishing for trauma patients, yet not actually wishing ill on anyone.

I haven’t always embraced unstable patients. When I was a new nurse I simultaneously dreaded yet was drawn to the instability of the ICU. I remember the early morning drives into work, a time of quiet anticipation filled with a gnawing fear that I’d make a mistake or be inexcusably inadequate at a crucial time.  I’d pray to gods above to be good enough, to be up to the tasks of the day; I clearly recall, more than once, taking report on an unstable patient and getting physically sick. Dramatic, I know, but born […]

2016-11-21T13:09:21-05:00September 12th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Best Care at Lower Cost: New IOM Report Spotlights Crucial Role of Nurses

By Mary D. Naylor, PhD, FAAN, RN. Dr. Naylor is the Marian S. Ware Professor in Gerontology and director of the NewCourtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is also the National Program Director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program, Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, aimed at generating, disseminating, and translating research to understand how nurses contribute to quality patient care. She was appointed to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission in 2010. 

Building on the Future of Nursing report’s call for nurses to fully engage with fellow health care professionals, a new report from the Institute of Medicine, Best Care at Lower Cost, calls on nurses and others in the health care system to apply emerging tools, technologies, and approaches to yield lower costs and better health outcomes. I had the great fortune to serve as a member of the study committee.

The complexity problem. The report couldn’t be more timely or relevant, particularly for nurses and the patients they serve, given the complexity of the current health care system. Administrative and workflow inefficiencies limit hospital nurses from spending more than about 30% of their time on direct patient care. With increasing specialization, modern medicine now includes nurses in more than 50 specialties. To successfully coordinate a patient’s care, nurses need to communicate and collaborate with patients, family caregivers, physicians, pharmacists, social workers, and many other team members.

The complexity […]

2016-11-21T13:09:23-05:00September 6th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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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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