Labor Day Déjà Vu – Nurses’ Views of Work, Then and Now

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

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

If you like nursing history, there’s a new blog called Echoes and Evidence by the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. (The first post draws on a 2005 AJN article on how nurses over 100 years ago responded to a series of typhoid epidemics in Philadelphia.)

Because AJN is over 100 years old (115 next year), it has a rich archive that I’ve been digging into recently (see my post from last week about an article Virginia Henderson wrote for AJN 50 years ago, and from late June, about nurses and D-Day).

So it seems especially fitting, just after Labor Day, to point to a January 1953 article by Sister Mary Barbara Ann, a former president of the Iowa Nurses Association (INA), which detailed findings from a survey of 223 general duty nurses in Iowa to learn their opinions of the hospitals in which they worked. I won’t present her exact findings here—we’ve made the article free until the end of September: just click through to the PDF. (Subscribers can always access the archives.) But here’s how she summarized what she learned:

“They [general duty nurses] are asking only for reasonable working conditions in which they can feel happy and secure. They are pleading for recognition and appreciation for what they are as persons and […]

2016-11-21T13:04:00-05:00September 2nd, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Some Essential AJN Resources on Care of Older Adults, Family Caregivers, More

800px-Woman-typing-on-laptopBy Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

August is one of my favorite months. Many people take time off, so the commute into AJN‘s Manhattan office is fairly easy. People’s pace seems to be a little bit slower; there seems to be less immediacy around responses to email. It’s a good time to catch up on reading manuscripts and other work I’ve had piled up.

If you’ve gone through your beach reading, here are a few useful collections on perennially important topics from our back pages:

If you’re just getting started in a nursing career, you might want to read a three-part series of articles, “Protecting Your License,” written by AJN contributing editor Edie Brous, who is a nurse and an attorney and writes on legal matters for the journal. Her series describes common myths about licensure and what steps to take to protect yourself if you are sued or brought up on charges by your state board of nursing. […]

2016-11-21T13:04:07-05:00August 11th, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Tragic Plane Crash, Truvada Concerns, Changing Infection Rates: AIDS/HIV Issues in the News

Truvada Truvada / via Wikimedia Commons

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

There have been a number of recent high-profile news stories as well as some notable new research related to HIV/AIDS and its treatment and prevention.

First, AJN would like to add its voice to those expressing heartfelt regret at the deaths of a number of prominent and widely respected HIV advocates and researchers in the Malaysia Airlines jet that appears to have been shot down over Ukraine last week.

The Truvada controversy. Those who who died on the plane had been heading to an international conference in Melbourne, Australia, where one of the hot topics under discussion would be the pros and cons of the continuing expansion of the use of the antiretroviral drug Truvada beyond the treatment of existing HIV infection to long-term prophylactic use by the uninfected.

The topic is particularly timely here in New York where Governor Cuomo last week announced that New York State would make Truvada a centerpiece of its HIV-prevention strategy. The drug, taken every day, is more than 90% effective in preventing infection, but, as an NPR story recently described, a number of experts have raised concerns about widespread long-term use of Truvada for HIV prevention, noting

2016-11-21T13:04:16-05:00July 21st, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing|0 Comments
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Nursing, HIV/AIDS, Continuity of Care, Treatment Advances, and the ACA: The Essentials

As the Affordable Care Act takes effect, a timely overview in AJN of recent developments in screening, treatment, care, and demographics of the HIV epidemic

CascadeofCare The ‘cascade of care’ (from the AJN article)

The newly released March issue of Health Affairs is devoted to looking at the ways the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will affect Americans with HIV/AIDS and those who have recently been in jail. One crucial feature of the ACA is that it prevents insurance companies from refusing coverage to those with a number of preexisting conditions. If you have a preexisting condition and don’t get insurance through work, you know how important this is.

Unfortunately, a large majority of those with HIV and AIDS do not have private health insurance. One article in the March issue of Health Affairs draws attention to the plight of the 60,000 or so uninsured or low-income people with HIV or AIDS who will not receive health insurance coverage because their states are among those that have chosen to opt out of the ACA provision that expands Medicaid eligibility. This means many patients in these states may lack consistent care and reliable access to life-saving drugs.

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) improves patient quality of life and severely reduces expensive and debilitating or fatal long-term health problems in those with HIV/AIDS. As noted in AJN‘s March CE article,

2016-11-21T13:05:17-05:00March 6th, 2014|health care policy, nursing perspective|3 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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