Not only is antibiotic resistance dangerous and expensive, it’s on the rise. Unfortunately cold and flu season can make people so uncomfortable they’ll do anything to feel better, including insisting their health care provider write a prescription for a medication that can’t help them. In an effort to change this, the CDC and FDA have teamed up for the 3rd annual Get Smart about Antibiotics Week (November 15–21).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZhVnR3HC8]
By Alison Bulman, senior editorial coordinator
How much of your nursing education focused on how to handle drug addicts and substance abuse? Probably not much, according to speakers at a recent event I attended with my colleague Christine Moffa, AJN’s clinical editor, at the Center for Health, Media, and Policy at Hunter College.
The event was focused around a clip (longer than the one above) from “Bevel Up: Drugs, Users and Outreach Nursing,” an award-winning film by Canadian documentary filmmaker Nettie Wild. (A photo of a street nurse from the program appeared on AJN’s cover in July 2009, along with an article about the program.) Fiona Gold, BA, RN, and Juanita Maginley, MA, BSN, RN, whose work in Vancouver is the subject of the film, spoke on the panel about the value of harm reduction and about the systemic flaws and tendency to stigmatize drug addicts that prevent health care from reaching this population.
The powerful clip showed street nurses searching the city’s alleys and housing complexes for drug addicts, dealers, and sex workers. They carry bags full of syringes, condoms, and crack pipe mouthpieces which they deliver to those willing to take them. They ask street patients whether they might be pregnant, have unsafe sex, may have a disease, and if they want to have the nurses draw blood for testing.
The outreach project started in response to Vancouver’s alarming increase in HIV infections. Medical services were not reaching the most vulnerable people, so nurses devised a plan to […]
Shawn Kennedy, AJN’s interim editor-in-chief, already posted here about the importance of the recently released Institute of Medicine Report on the Future of Nursing. Its implications are particularly profound at a time when we have a scarcity of primary care providers—and also at a time when the Affordable Care Act (i.e., health care reform) has designated more resources to nursing education and to generally making better use of nurses’ expertise. A number of bloggers have written about the IOM report, several of them expressing chagrin about the predictably naysaying American Medical Association response. Rebutting the AMA, the Center for Health Media and Policy at Hunter College had this to say. One working NP who weighed in on this topic is Stephen Ferrara, who noted (almost two weeks ago, in fact, though we missed it until now) the real world implications of the current situation for NPs in New York State, in a succinct post on his blog, A Nurse Practitioner’s View:
The bottom line is (at least in NY where I practice), without a collaborating physician on record, the 14,000 or so NPs are unemployed and can’t legally do anything that we were trained or educated to do. It is time to remove these non-evidence based barriers and retrospective reviews and allow us to function as true partners on the health care team. Collaboration among providers would still continue to happen and I promise pigs wouldn’t start to fly. Fourteen states have already transitioned to to an […]
By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief
This past Tuesday, I attended the release of the highly anticipated (at least by nursing) report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the future of nursing. Spearheaded and supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the report provides a review of nursing’s role in health care and details what changes need to occur for the future—not just of nursing, but for the future health of the health care system.
While the findings support what nursing has been claiming all along—that nurses have a critical role in health care and the health care system needs nurses to practice to the full extent of their capability—what is especially important about this report is that it is backed by the IOM’s multidisciplinary panel and an “objective evaluation of evidence according to the robust evaluation processes of the National Academy of Sciences,” said John Rowe, a committee member and professor at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
The panel at the public briefing for the release of the report included some health care heavyweights who voiced strong support for the findings:
Harvey V. Fineburg, president of the IOM: “One thing shouts out—nurses are critical to the nation’s health and central to the goals of high quality care.”
By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief
I know we’ve written a lot about Florence Nightingale on this blog recently (see Susan Hassmiller’s series of posts, In Florence’s Footsteps: Notes from a Journey) and I don’t want to put off those who aren’t necessarily fans, but I came across an editorial written by Gloria Donnelly, editor-in-chief of Holistic Nursing Practice, that resonated with me. She writes about how the holistic nature of Nightingale’s approach fits with much that’s going on today in health care reform, citing as one example the trend toward teaching people to take charge of their own health. (The entire Fall issue highlights the work of holistic practitioners—I especially liked Garden Walking for Depression: A Research Report.)
Donnelly writes:
We believe that Ms. Nightingale, an advocate of health, self-healing, and healthy environments, would be proud of the strides that nurses have made to promote holistic health and care around the world. . . . Nightingale believed that ’health nursing‘ and cultivating good health were equally important to ’sick nursing,’ the art and principles of which she developed almost single-handedly. Prevention superceded cure in Nightingale’s schema as she advocated for Health Missioners to work, first in the villages of rural India and then in England, teaching women how to prevent disease and maintain healthy environments.
This, in a nutshell, describes nursing at its core. It’s a shame that of all of Nightingale’s philosophies and improvements that were […]