Recent Decline in U.S. Opioid Prescriptions: Good News But Some Concerns

by frankieleon/ via flickr by frankieleon/ via flickr

It was widely reported in the past week that there have been steady declines in the number of opioid prescriptions in the U.S. for the past three years, with the declines the steepest in some of the states considered to have the worst opioid misuse crises.

This is good news, suggesting that efforts to address some problem areas like renegade pain clinics prescribing for profit, patients who go from doctor to doctor seeking opioid prescriptions, and the diversion of legitimate opioid prescriptions may be starting to bear fruit.

A balanced overview of the situation can be found in this New York Times article. The authors also acknowledge that patients in pain are now facing new hurdles to pain relief, quoting the director of one prominent medical school’s program on pain research education and policy: “The climate has definitely shifted. . . . It is now one of reluctance, fear of consequences and encumbrance with administrative hurdles. A lot of patients who are appropriate candidates for opioids have been caught up in that response.”

Much of the reporting on the opioid epidemic lumps all people who take opioids into one big statistical brew. While startling and alarming numbers about overdoses from legal and illegal opioids steal the headlines, little media and scholarly analysis focuses on the lower likelihood […]

2016-11-21T13:01:12-05:00May 26th, 2016|health care policy, Nursing, nursing perspective, pain management, patient experience, patient safety, Patients|1 Comment
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Psychiatric Nursing: The Seemingly Unreachable Patient

By Jennifer Rodgers for AJN. Illustration by Jennifer Rodgers for AJN

In many fields, we must keep doing the same thing over and over without any apparent results. Nurses, for example, may find that their efforts to make a patient safe, to reach a patient, to ease a patient’s suffering have little visible effect. This is just part of the work, but some patients will inevitably pose a greater personal challenge than others.

“Five Words,” the Reflections essay in the May issue of AJN, written by former psychiatric nurse Tania Renee Zayid, is about one of those patients and the feelings of hope and disappointment his nurse experiences in his presence. In it, she writes:  […]

2016-11-21T13:01:12-05:00May 23rd, 2016|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|0 Comments
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What a Nurse Really Wants

Lois Corcoran, BSN, PCCN, is pursuing a master of science in nursing degree and works on a cardiac step-down unit. Although Nurses Week recently ended, we felt that this short, honest post sums up the way a lot of nurses seem to feel.

via flickr creative commons/by you me via flickr creative commons/by you me

I have been a nurse for 18 years. I went to nursing school when I was 33 years old, a year after I’d completed treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma. I was a single mom, newly divorced, trying to make my way.

Becoming a nurse felt like my calling. I was passionate about it. I had been through so much, and I knew I had a lot to give back—I wanted to be with patients, holding their hands, giving them the reassurance we so desperately want to hear when we are going through ill health. I knew that I could be that nurse. I felt that my cancer had been the portal to this realization, opening my eyes and heart to what patients need.

Eighteen years later the truth of my life as a nurse is a little more complicated. It’s not that my original soul’s calling isn’t still there, deep inside me. I still feel a close connection with my patients. I still […]

2017-08-04T09:53:14-04:00May 19th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|9 Comments
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AJN News: Better Palliative Care Training, Reducing Antibiotic Use, More

AJN’s monthly news section covers timely and important research and policy stories that are relevant to the nursing world. Here’s a preview of the stories you’ll find in our current issue (news articles in AJN are free access):

16802[1] Two culture plates growing bacteria in the presence of antibiotics. Photo by Melissa Dankel / James Gathany / CDC. Reducing Inappropriate Antibiotic Prescriptions

On-the-job behavioral interventions that involved social components—accountable justification (an EHR-based prompt requiring a prescriber to document an explanation for the choice of medication) and peer comparison—resulted in lower rates of inappropriate antibiotic prescribing by primary care physicians, according to a recent study.

Increase in Colorectal Cancer Occurring Before Age 50

Diagnoses of colorectal cancer in younger people are on the rise: between 1998 and 2011, one in seven patients diagnosed with colon cancer was younger than 50. This summary provides some useful context to help readers understand the implications of such numbers.

AACN Recommends Increased Palliative Care Training in Undergraduate Nursing Education

Undergraduate nursing school curricula should devote greater attention to palliative care training to reflect updated understanding and practice in the field, according to new recommendations from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). […]

2016-11-21T13:01:12-05:00May 18th, 2016|Nursing|0 Comments
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Napping on the Night Shift: What a Pilot Study Revealed

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Table 1. Guidelines for Hospital Nurses on Implementing Naps on the Night Shift (click to enlarge)Nurses who work the night shift often struggle with high levels of sleepiness. But while onsite napping is effectively used to counter worker fatigue in other safety-sensitive industries, the practice has yet to win wide acceptance in nursing.

Curious about why this is so, nurse researchers Jeanne Geiger-Brown and colleagues recently conducted a pilot study. They report their findings in this month’s CE–Original Research feature, “Napping on the Night Shift: A Two-Hospital Implementation Project” (for some night shift napping ground rules, see, at right, Table 1: Guidelines for Hospital Nurses on Implementing Naps on the Night Shift—click table to enlarge).

Here’s an overview:

Purpose: To assess the barriers to successful implementation of night-shift naps and to describe the nap experiences of night-shift nurses who took naps.

Methods: In this two-hospital pilot implementation project, napping on the night shift was offered to six nursing units. Unit nurse managers’ approval was sought, and further explanation was given to a unit’s staff nurses. A nap experience form, which included the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale, was used to assess pre-nap sleepiness level, nap duration and perceived sleep experience, post-nap sleep inertia, and the perceived helpfulness of the nap. Nurse managers and staff nurses were also interviewed at the end of the three-month study period.

Results: Successful implementation occurred on only one of the six units, with partial success seen on […]

2016-11-21T13:01:12-05:00May 16th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research, patient safety|3 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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