The 1956 painting by Gerald McLaughlin on this month’s cover is titled “Act as if the whole election depended on your single vote, and as if the whole Parliament (and therein the whole nation) on that single person whom you now choose to be a member of it.” See our “On the Cover” column to learn about this work and why we chose to feature it.

The October issue of AJN is now live.

“The frequent and often simultaneous ringing of alarms, including many that are false, nonemergent, or nonactionable, has led to overwhelm, alarm distrust, and desensitization,” write Olawunmi Obisesan and colleagues in this month’s Original Research article, “Alarm Fatigue: Exploring the Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping Strategies of Nurses.” Their study findings indicate a need for interventions and redesigned protocols.

The October CE article, “Functional Medicine in Nursing,” explains the core principles of functional medicine—a patient-centered approach that seeks to address the underlying causes of disease rather than focusing on managing the symptoms—and how nurses can learn and incorporate it into their practice.

Election Day is approaching. Two articles in this issue address why voting is crucial—and how barriers to doing so threaten democracy and can impact health policy:

“Critical Appraisal of Evidence for DNP-Prepared Nurses,” the fourth article in our Evidence-Based Decision-Making series, focuses on how partnering with a librarian is essential to finalizing the body of evidence needed to answer the clinical question, and how to take the body of evidence through the first two phases of the critical appraisal process: rapid critical appraisal and evaluation.

See also the extensive health care news sections, the Drug Watch and Journal Watch sections, an AJN Reports on social media and the crisis of adolescent mental health, a Specialty Spotlight on nurse educators, and more.

Browse and subscribe.

Some articles in this issue like the original research studies and the editorial will be free to access; others will require log-in or subscription. You can subscribe to AJN, America’s most respected and oldest general interest nursing journal, for just $37.95 for a year (12 issues), so why not give it a try or give a subscription as a gift? We pay attention to appearance as well as content, and hope the cover of every issue will look good on a coffee table!