“As a nurse, I believe in science as a guide for our actions….As a human being with morals, empathy, and compassion, I believe there are lines no person, certainly no government leader, should cross.”—editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her editorial, “No Time for Silence”
The October issue of AJN is now live. Here are some highlights.
Original Research: Suicide Among RNs: An Analysis of 2015 Data from the National Violent Death Reporting System
The authors of this study sought to determine the number of suicides and estimated rate of suicide among RNs. Their findings indicate that RNs may die by suicide at higher rates than the total employed population in the 16-to-64-year age range.
From the CDC: Understanding Autism Spectrum Disorder
An evidence-based review of the risk factors for autism spectrum disorder, its epidemiology, common concurrent conditions, evaluation, diagnosis, treatments, and outcomes.
New Series: Nursing Research, Step by Step: How Does Research Start?
This article—the first in a new series on clinical research by nurses—focuses on how to start the research process by identifying a topic of interest and developing a well-defined research question.
Special Feature: Behind the Scenes of an Educational Escape Room
How the authors created, piloted, and evaluated an immersive gaming experience to teach first-year nursing students about safe medication administration.
Cultivating Quality: Improving Quiet at Night on a Telemetry Unit: Introducing a Holistic Sleep Menu Intervention
A quality improvement initiative aimed to resolve the causes of sleep disruption and increase patients’ uninterrupted hours of sleep.
There’s much more in our October issue, including:
- A Nursing Resources collection of websites to inform nurses about the upcoming election and empower them to make their voices heard.
- An AJN Reports on the U.S. COVID-19 testing failure.
- A What I’m Reading book review of Quinn Grundy’s Infiltrating Healthcare: How Marketing Works Underground to Influence Nurses.
Click here to browse the table of contents and explore the issue on our website.
A note on the cover.
The political cartoon on this month’s cover depicts a harried nurse in PPE casting her vote for president. Drawn by Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist David Horsey, the cartoon symbolizes the power of nurses as voters and also references a defining issue faced by U.S. nurses this year: shortages of PPE. Its interpretation is of course up to the reader.
One small cavil about a phrase used here that is widely applied (to our collective detriment) in this day and age. Educated and thoughtful people don’t “believe in science.” Science is not a religion. We BELIEVE science. When people tell you they “don’t believe in science” they are saying they have no faith in the scientific method, itself evidence-based, i.e., not faith-based. They literally do not believe the evidence that is there for them to see. We can see what this has brought us.
A small editorial option, to root this out whenever it slips in almost unnoticed, but worth the effort it if it helps nudge people into a better perspective.