“Get to know patients’ former selves. Ask different questions. Discover their answers. I am so glad I did.” —Jennifer Chicca, author of the July Reflections column, “What Joanna Would Have Wanted”

The July issue of AJN is now live. Here are some highlights.

CE: Original Research: Helping Health Care Providers and Staff Process Grief Through a Hospital-Based Program

This study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of offering an intensive bereavement support program—aimed at addressing grief and loss related to both professional and personal experiences—to hospital employees in a large health system.

CE: Addressing Implicit Bias in Nursing: A Review

This article describes the ways that implicit, or unconscious, bias among health care providers can contribute to health care disparities, and offers strategies nurses can use to discover and overcome their own implicit biases.

Special Feature: Rising to the Challenge: Re-Embracing the Wald Model of Nursing

The author discusses how Lillian Wald’s model of health care, in which nurses work at the intersection of medicine and society, may be useful today as nurses seek to address diseases of despair and improve health equity.

Transition to Practice: Surviving Your First Code

This article prepares new nurses for their first code, describes what happens during a code, and reviews the responsibilities of the resuscitation team.

Legal Clinic: The Elements of a Nursing Malpractice Case, Part 1: Duty

Anyone suing a health care provider for malpractice must prove four elements in order to prevail: duty, breach, causation, and harm. This is the first article in a four-part series that will discuss each element in turn, using real cases as illustrative examples.

There’s much more in our July issue, including:

  • An AJN Reports on mental health care in children and adolescents.
  • An Update from the CDC on a recent increase in tick-borne rickettsial diseases in the United States.
  • A Profile of a nurse whose nonprofit gives young adults in recovery a platform at local schools.

Click here to browse the table of contents and explore the issue on our website.

A note on the cover:

This month’s cover features early 20th-century scenes from the Henry Street Settlement in New York City. These photos document nursing’s early role in advancing health in the community. Settlement nurses visited poor city residents, many of whom were immigrants living in tenement housing, treating illnesses and providing health education.

The Henry Street Settlement was founded in 1893 by nursing pioneer Lillian Wald. It provided more than just medical care—it offered classes and vocational training, worked to improve squalid living conditions, and even established one of the first local playgrounds for children. Though Wald’s model of nursing initially flourished, it eventually lost ground in favor of hospital and physician-centric models. But her ideas may offer routes toward improving the current state of U.S. health care. In this month’s Special Feature, Patricia Pittman calls for leaning on and expanding the Wald model as a means to achieve health equity.