Friday Nursing Blogs Roundup, More or Less

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

Another Friday in New York, and it’s time to do a quick tour of the nursing blogosphere after a grueling week in which the city I will always think of as home, Boston, took a major hit on a holiday that always marks the end of a long winter, the first stirrings of spring, the Red Sox playing in the morning, no one at work, glimpses of marathoners passing in the distance up still salt-stained avenues under barely budding trees, usually in bright sun and a gusty breeze with an underside of chill.

I have noted ad nauseam in the past that blogs have life cycles, wax and wane, flourish or fade out. And that’s okay. Though maybe blogs should go to a blog graveyard at some point, or be given a proper burial, or demolished like old buildings in a great controlled cinematic whoosh of collapsing pixels and pixel-dust. Or, in some cases, put in a museum to mark a moment in Web history or preserve particularly lively voices and experiences for posterity.

Enough throat clearing. There isn’t much out there to report this week. We try to collect links to sane, more or less active blogs on our nursing blogs page. A few nurse bloggers are perennially engaging and active, and a couple of these excellent bloggers even write occasional posts for this blog, so for once I won’t draw attention to them. But here’s what else I could find:

We the people. Many nurse blogs and Twitter streams and Facebook pages have been posting links to a petition to the White House to remove barriers preventing advanced practice nurses from practicing to their full scope. The petition has until just April 22 to reach the required 100,000 signatures; the last time I checked, admittedly about a week ago, it was only about a quarter of the way there. If you happen to know Justin Bieber, please ask him to publicize this. In lieu of that, consider sending it to your social media connections, and take a moment to sign yourself.

A brief note on the readability of blogs. By “readability,” I’m not talking about style, as you’d expect, but more about how easy and pleasant the blog is to read in an actual physical sense. The right word might instead be “legibility.” Or, put another way, did you choose a green or black or red background for your text? Though it’s nice to be reminded of the early days of the Web and the idiosyncratic appearance of many blogs, I now find blogs with such colored backgrounds almost impossible to read. Consider making a change to something closer to the traditional black text on a whitish background. And consider avoiding flowery fonts.

More on nurse staffing and why it matters: at the INQRI (Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative) blog, further confirmation that “better nurse staffing, education and work environment contribute to patient outcomes”:

A new study in Medical Care, conducted by Matthew McHugh, an RWJF Nurse Faculty Scholar,
finds that the lower mortality rates at Magnet Hospitals are achieved
in part because of investments in nursing. This study reflects many of
the findings of INQRI studies into the impact of nurse staffing, work environment and education on quality of patient care.

Conference tips. At In the Round, the blog at Nursing Center, a short post lists “tips and time-savers” for those of you who from time to time attend professional conferences. I used to go to a lot of them, and they really do take practice and some strategy.

Already sick of Nurses Week and Nurses Day (and still wondering about whether to use an apostrophe s or just an apostrophe or nothing with them)? At Impacted Nurse, there’s a strangely heartwarming yet appropriately skeptical piece called “Note to Nurse Day: I don’t need to write some silly note.”

And that’s really it for today. Have a great weekend, and let us know if you find a really good nursing blog we don’t know about yet.