Take a Walk: American Heart Month, for Nurses and Everyone Else

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

By Eric Hunt/via Wikimedia Commons By Eric Hunt/via Wikimedia Commons

So we all know what we need to do to prevent heart disease: eat a healthy diet (such as the highly touted Mediterranean diet, which has been “consistently effective with regard to cardiovascular risk”), get regular exercise, and don’t smoke. But most of us—and I’m guilty—don’t quite follow the advice we may give our patients or family members. It’s difficult to carve out time for oneself in addition to working all day (and for most nurses, we’re not talking a nine to five day—many work 12-hour shifts, or at least a 10-hour day if in administrative positions), plus commuting and then spending time with family. If you have school-age children in activities, there are also car pools and homework.

We need to find 30 minutes—or even 20 minutes—daily to jump-start our own engines. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, heart disease kills one in four women and is the leading cause of death for both women and men in the United States. And while genetics certainly plays a part, cardiovascular health is mostly about prevention. So make a 30-minute appointment with yourself and stick to it.

The American Heart Association (AHA) initiative highlighting heart disease in February is a good reminder to us all, especially in […]

2016-11-21T13:05:31-05:00February 3rd, 2014|nursing perspective, personal health practices|0 Comments
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A Report from the ANA Safe Staffing Conference

Katheren Koehn, MA, RN, AJN editorial board member and executive director of MNORN (Minnesota Organization of Registered Nurses), reports from last week’s ANA conference on staffing held in Washington, DC.

staffiing Click image for source page at ANA staffing site.

The ANA Safe Staffing Conference ended on Saturday. There were almost 700 registered nurses from all over the country in attendance—nurses in management, direct care, and leadership—all gathered to try to discover new strategies for how to solve the most challenging issue in nursing: safe staffing.

Not a new issue. This has long been the most challenging issue for nursing. Teresa Stone, editor of Poems from the Heart of Nursing: Selected Poems from the American Journal of Nursing, told me that, as she was searching the archives of 113 years of AJN issues for her book, she found that staffing issues were a frequent theme. Today, as the work of nurses has become more complex, the need to create sustainable solutions to ensuring appropriate staffing is our most critical issue—hence the ANA Staffing Conference.

The body of evidence supporting the idea that appropriate nurse staffing makes a difference in saving patients’ lives has grown exponentially in the past 20 years. This evidence—paired with the new federal financial incentives for hospitals to improve patient outcomes and experiences—makes it seem inevitable that increasing nurse staffing would be the […]

2016-11-21T13:06:06-05:00November 11th, 2013|career, health care policy, nursing perspective, nursing research, safe staffing|0 Comments
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We Call You ‘Wheat Head’ – An Unexpected Crosscultural Encounter

I entered the wall-less, thatch-roofed waiting area of the clinic with my right hand in a ball of bandages, taped to my chest. The airy space was almost empty, without nurses or even a receptionist. The only other person in the little space, sitting very elegantly on one of the narrow wooden benches, was a woman in traditional West African dress who was quite pregnant.

NovemberReflectionsThe November Reflections essay in AJN is called “Surprise!” Its opening paragraph is above. This is one of our occasional Reflections essays by a writer who is not a nurse. In this case, the author Thomas Turman’s easy, self-deprecating tone, and the matter-of-fact manner in which his unexpected patient faces a situation that might induce a certain panic in many people from wealthier countries, feels just right. […]

2016-11-21T13:06:07-05:00November 8th, 2013|career, Nursing, Public health|0 Comments
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They’re Not Taking Away Our Puppies (And God Help Them If They Do)

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

I am amazed at the amount of time being wasted on the relatively mundane matter of health care exchanges. It seems we are now facing a government shutdown; there are creepy and misleading advertisements funded by conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers in order to scare people from signing up for insurance; some red states have actually enacted laws forbidding the health care navigators from helping people understand the new system and sign up for it, and many of these states have refused to create their own exchanges to help their citizens comply with the new law.

The ACA is a law. You can’t just ignore it if it doesn’t meet your personal preferences or political ideas. Given the heated rhetoric the Republicans are trotting out about it, you’d think the government was trying to take away our puppies, instead of implementing ideas originally floated by Republicans themselves to make life a bit easier for millions of Americans whose life decisions are unduly ruled by crazy health care billing practices, byzantine insurance regulations, discrimination against those who have chronic conditions, insanely varying pricing for simple tests, and the like. […]

2016-11-21T13:06:26-05:00September 30th, 2013|health care policy, Patients|9 Comments
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One Is the Loneliest Number

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

The great Bartholdi statue, liberty enlightening the world: the gift of France to the American people. Speculative depiction published the year before the statue was erected. In this depiction the statue faces south; it actually faces east/Wikimedia Commons The Bartholdi statue, liberty enlightening the world: the gift of France to the American people. Speculative depiction published the year before the statue was erected. In this depiction the statue faces south; it actually faces east/Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been struck recently by how the United States sometimes seems to stand apart from other nations. This is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.”

The most obvious example of this is the recent push—temporarily put on hold due to the emergence of negotiations about the possible handover of Syrian chemical weapons to Russia—to garner support among other nations for a military strike against the Syrian government in response to its use of chemical weapons against its own people.

By now, most of us have seen the graphic videos on media outlets and they are indeed disturbing. There are signs of neurotoxicity in some of […]

2016-11-21T13:06:34-05:00September 13th, 2013|health care policy, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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