“Members of the health professions team should recognize, and join their colleagues in dismantling, structural racism.”—Bernice Rumala and Kenya Beard in their February Viewpoint article, “Resilience Will Not Erase Structural Racism”
The February issue of AJN is now live. Here’s what’s new. Some articles may be free only to subscribers.
Special Feature: An Overdue Reckoning on Racism in Nursing
The authors discuss a project they launched to encourage honest discussion of racism in nursing and promote meaningful actions all nurses can take to achieve an antiracist nursing profession.
CE: Using Smart IV Infusion Pumps Outside of Patient Rooms
An overview of one medical center’s use of an innovative IV pump relocation practice in response to COVID-19—and how nurses addressed concerns for safety and efficacy.
Update from the CDC: Understanding Filtering Facepiece Respirators
A discussion of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) respirator approval process, the competition from non-NIOSH-approved respirators, and how to ensure your respirator offers adequate protection.
Legal Clinic: Employer Vaccine Mandates
AJN’s legal expert answers several timely questions of concern to nurses, including can employers require their employees to be vaccinated and terminate those who refuse?
Strip Savvy: A Case of an Asymptomatic Older Adult
This latest article in a series on the basics of ECG interpretation presents a case scenario and an ECG strip, and takes readers step by step through analyzing the heart rhythm.
There’s much more in our February issue, including:
- An AJN Reports on the current state of nursing.
- A Nursing Research, Step by Step column on case–control studies.
- A Conversation with Abigail Matos-Pagán, an expert in disaster nursing.
Click here to browse the table of contents and explore the issue on our website.
A note on the cover.
On this month’s cover is Reckoning Together, a painting by nurse midwife and nursing professor Lucinda Canty. Canty is lead author of the aforementioned special feature, which presents an ongoing antiracist initiative she and her colleagues started after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
RE: An Overdue Reckoning of Racism in Nursing
There is no more appropriate time than here and now, to focus on the issues that were long ignored. We must look back, we must reconcile our turbulent and difficult past before we can move forward and into the Future! Nursing professionals have not only experienced discrimination but also witnessed time and time again patients that were traumatized because or past practices of racial discrimination, racially (not scientifically) motivated medical practices and procedures and injustice.
We must know, who we are as Nursing Professionals and we must know, who are clients are. Without awareness and understanding of the past we can’t move forward. Without understanding ourselves and our parents as people we can’t deliver an effective and holistic nursing international.
As nurses holding trust of public we must do more to advocate for changes within our own profession and healthcare system.