Mid-October Rainy Thursday Web Roundup

By Jacob Molyneux, blog editor/senior editor

The nursosphere is thriving and Change of Shift, the always interesting compendium of what’s new on nursing blogs, is up over at Emergiblog.

The health care reform process creeps slowly but surely toward an end someone somewhere can surely envision. One crucial question many are still asking is whether insurance companies might serve consumers a bit more readily and agreeably if they were forced to face a little competition from a public option. After all, isn’t competition supposed to be a good thing?

Most experts don’t expect the H1N1 vaccine to pose any more danger than the seasonal flu vaccine; even so, many Americans (and nurses commenting here, or taking our poll about the mandatory vaccine) continue to be wary, prompting public health officials to engage in especially aggressive surveillance measures in order to quickly detect any possible negative reactions to the vaccine: “Government Keeps Close Eye on Swine Flu Vaccine.”

AJN clinical editor Christine Moffa posted here a while back about how meditation might help cranky or exhausted or overworked nurses stay focused on what matters during the workday. Today the NY Times has a related piece on “doctor burnout” and meditation.

The role of social media in health care is constantly evolving as we all find our way. Its use by hospital workers is at issue in a recent post at Running a Hospital, about one hospital’s decision to ban social media from all its computers. And here’s something else on this: blogger Not Nurse Ratched wonders if social media policies in […]

2016-11-21T13:21:43-05:00October 15th, 2009|health care policy, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Nurses to Obama: “Don’t Love Us – Just Put Us at the Table”

Mason told the conference that she was disappointed in the remark because “that’s not what nurses need.” Nurses need to be respected for what they know and for what they do, and then they need to be given a seat at the policy table when strategies for changing the health care system are being discussed.

2016-11-21T13:21:56-05:00October 6th, 2009|career, health care policy, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Marketers Honing In On Online Nurses

Internet Splat Map (jurvetson/via Flickr)

Nurses, you’re being watched: a marketing Website has an article on the growing influence of nurses online. Let us know what you think. Here’s an excerpt:

. . . Manhattan Research recently released a report about nurses online noting that approximately three out of four U.S. nurses recommend health websites to patients. The study notes that the average nurse spends eight hours per week online for professional purposes, which is just as much time as physicians, and almost all of them use the Internet in between patient consultations. Nurses are also proactive in researching medical product information specifically online – over eighty percent have visited a pharma, biotech, or device company website in the past year.

In addition to the prevalence of the Internet as a research and patient communication tool, nurses are continuing to find their unique voices online through a growing number of prominent nursing blogs such as Codeblog and Emergiblog which both share powerful stories of healthcare from the nurses’ point of view.

Also found today on the Web: […]
2016-11-21T13:22:00-05:00October 2nd, 2009|health care policy, healthcare social media|1 Comment
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Comparative Effectiveness Research–Is Health Care Reform Possible Without It?

compare

Improve health, reduce costs: that’s the mantra health care reform advocates keep repeating. And it’s easy to see why: this year, total health care spending in the United States is expected to reach $2.5 trillion, accounting for almost 18% of the gross domestic product. By 2018 the total could be $4.4 trillion-and because economic growth is expected to be slower over this period, that total may account for one-fifth of the gross domestic product in 2018. And even with all of this spending, the United States lags behind other industrialized nations on many measures of health and well being.

While there are many paths to achieving the twin goals of better outcomes and lower costs, a consensus has been growing among health policy experts and economists that part of the solution is to improve the way medical research is conducted and then put it into practice in both providers’ and consumers’ decision making. Comparative effectiveness research (CER)-a model by which cost-benefit analyses of different treatments for a given condition are compared-provides the means for understanding which interventions yield the best health outcomes for the least amount of money.

Read the rest of the article in the October issue of AJN here. With something so complex, life altering, and expensive as health care, how could we not expect to do a little comparative shopping about cost and quality?

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2016-11-21T13:22:02-05:00October 1st, 2009|health care policy|0 Comments
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Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have an Office of the National Nurse?

By Diana Mason, editor-in-chief emeritus

Ann Keen

First, the necessary throat-clearing about who and where: I recently attended a public session held by the Institute of Medicine Initiative on the Future of Nursing. Chaired by University of Miami president and former secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and chief nurse for Cedar Sinai Medical Center Linda Burnes Bolton, the session began with presentations by two nurses involved in the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery in England: Ann Keen, Member of Parliament and Parliamentary Undersecretary for Health Services, who chairs the British commission; and Jane Salvage, the lead secretariat for the commission and a former contributing editor for AJN.

Now the point: During the formal session, Keen noted that various countries in the UK each have a chief nurse officer (CNO) who is responsible for developing a national nursing strategy. Afterwards, I interviewed Keen and Salvage, who both said they didn’t understand why American nurses were not supporting the call for a CNO for the United States, one who would be charged with developing and overseeing a national nursing strategy for this nation. In their eyes, a CNO who is on par with the surgeon general could help the nation to develop approaches to ensure an adequate nursing workforce, identify barriers to their full utilization, identify new models of care to better promote the health of the public, and develop strategies […]

2016-11-21T13:22:18-05:00September 21st, 2009|career, health care policy, nursing perspective|17 Comments
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