career Archives - Page 55 of 68

What Lies Ahead? AACN Presidents Weigh In on Health Care Reform, Rapid Response Teams, and More

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

On my last day at the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses’ annual meeting last week in Washington, DC, I had a chance to speak with both Beth Hammer, whose term as president ended with the meeting, and Kristine Peterson, the new president. Our conversation ranged from how they felt about being president of such a large nursing organization to their views on health care reform and how rapid response teams are affecting the work environment of critical care nurses. You can hear the conversation free on AJN’s Web site: go to the Podcasts tab and click on Conversations. Or just click here (the download may take a minute or two).

And don’t miss my first post from the exhibit hall floor at the meeting (the National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition, or “the NTI”) and my second post on a conversation with a critical care nurse about a bad staffing practice, which seems to have hit a nerve!

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:17:31-05:00May 24th, 2010|career, health care policy, nursing perspective|0 Comments

‘Go Home, Stay, Good Nurse’: Hospital Staffing Practices Suck the Life Out of Nurses

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

After I last wrote to you from the NTI (the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses’ annual National Teaching Institute and Critical Care Exposition), I headed back to the exhibit hall to check out the helicopter and the Army’s mobile operating tent. But I didn’t get to either one, because I met a young critical care nurse from a regional hospital in Missouri. We chatted about her workplace, and it was obvious that she was very proud of the work she and her colleagues did. When I asked her, “What’s your biggest issue?”, she said that it was probably staffing. I expected her to cite the shortage and the difficulty of finding qualified critical care nurses. But that wasn’t what she meant—rather she was talking about bare-bones staffing because of tight budgets. Her hospital routinely switches between two tactics: it sends nurses home when the patient census is low (when this happens, the nurses are paid only $2 an hour to be on call, but must still use a vacation day to retain full-time benefits, a tactic that rapidly depletes their vacation time); or, when the patient census is higher, the hospital imposes mandatory overtime, creating havoc in nurses’ schedules, finances, and personal lives. And people wonder why there’s a nursing shortage! […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2017-03-28T13:15:48-04:00May 20th, 2010|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research, safe staffing|34 Comments

Who You Calling ‘Just a Nurse’?

It makes my blood boil when I hear a nurse say, “I’m just a nurse.” Sure, I’ve heard some nurses say, “I’m a nurse,” and I’ve heard many qualify their position by specifying, “I’m a critical care nurse” or “I’m a dialysis nurse.” But all too often, especially when asked whether they work in a specialty area, I hear nurses say apologetically, “No, I’m just a regular nurse,” or “I’m just a floor nurse.”

So says AJN‘s interim editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her May editorial. Now here at AJN we’d like to reassure you that we don’t believe that anyone’s blood can actually boil. THAT is not an evidence-based statement. But Shawn’s hyperbole is meant to drive home a point: this is a topic that should matter to nurses, whatever their education level or exact job description.

We hope you’ll take a moment to read Shawn’s editorial in full and then let us know here what you think.

Longish sidebar: AJN may be a little uptight and old-fashioned about checking the facts we publish and making sure our editors and copyeditors fix unclear or inaccurate or simply awkward language, structure, and use of sources; ferret out conflicts of interest in our writers; and generally keep the journal a place you know you can trust in a world of shifting sources driven by suspect motivations. But here on our more informal blog, we also really really like (and do not edit!) reader comments, even very casual comments punched out on a tiny smartphone keypad.

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Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:17:41-05:00May 17th, 2010|career, nursing perspective|0 Comments

New Nurse Keeps Grandma’s Gutsy Resolve, Varied Career in Sights

By Cara Gewolb, BSN. Cara lives in New York City and in January completed an accelerated 15-month BSN program at New York University College of Nursing for those with previous bachelor’s degrees. This longer-than-usual post was passed along to us by Barbara Glickstein, a producer and host of Healthstyles radio show, where Cara recently talked about her grandmother’s career as a public health nurse. We post it today in honor of Nurses’ Week—and also in honor of all the nurses who have recently graduated and are looking for work in a tight market.

My grandmother Frances Reichman Lubin had been the only nurse in her family until I received a BSN in January. As a new nurse I’m a bit unsure of myself, but I’m looking for work and excited to enter my profession. While I’m interested in becoming an ER or ICU nurse, my grandmother’s diverse career reminds me to stay open to opportunity. Her career extended from the 1940s to 1970s and encompassed stints as an army nurse, public health nurse, ICU nurse, teacher, and administrator, as well as time off to raise children and further her nursing education. I keep her example as a funny, gutsy woman who always kept her sense of purpose in my sights as I go forward. She died […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:17:45-05:00May 12th, 2010|career, narratives, Nursing|5 Comments

Scientist, Healer, Nurse

. . . we’d sliced his chest cavity open during our dissection, rendering his beating heart clearly visible. He was pinned to a small tray and covered with a cheesecloth. I brought him home in a shoe box on a sparsely populated school bus, and placed him carefully on the coffee table in the living room.

If the above excerpt sounds like it’s lifted from the intimate memoirs of a torturer, it’s not. It’s from the May Reflections essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” which is written by Marcy Phipps (for the nicest version, click through to the PDF once you’ve reached the article at our Website). Marcy is a nurse who uses a simple, elegantly rendered childhood story to explore the sometimes unnerving gap inside every nurse between the roles of objective scientist and compassionate healer. -JM