Off the Charts

Latino Nurses in the United States: Numbers Don’t Reflect Demographic Trends

“Increasing [the] numbers of RNs from minority backgrounds is a prime consideration in reducing the substantial racial and ethnic disparities in health.” – National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that, by the year 2060, Latinos, currently 17% of the population, will make up almost 29% of the total U.S. population. Will the diversity of the nursing workforce reflect the diversity of the populations we serve? The authors of “Latino Nurses in the United States: An Overview of Three Decades (1980-2010)” provide us with a demographic baseline against which to measure our future diversity progress:

“In 2010 (the latest data available), there were 1186 non-Latino white RNs for every 100,000 non-Latino whites in the U.S., yet only 311 Latino RNs for every 100,000 Latinos in the U.S.”

The authors review historical information on Latino nursing in the U.S., offer a state-by-state profile from the five states with the largest Latino populations (California, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and New York), and recommend modifications to existing nursing school recruitment, admission, and retention strategies. […]

Betsy Todd, MPH, RN2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 24th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments

Nurse Helps Prepare Police for Encounters with the Mentally Ill

Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, with Captain Dan Cahill (left) and Chief Robert H. Gustafson at the Orange County Police Department in Orange, California. Photo courtesy of the Orange Police Department.

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Nurses—especially those in the ED—often interact with law enforcement in the course of their work. However, few go outside of their setting to get involved in the training of police officers. But that’s exactly what one mental health nurse, Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, did when she noticed that state hospitals were releasing patients with mental illness into the community and felt officers needed more tools in their arsenal in order to handle their potential encounters with these people.

“Officers today have a difficult job managing crime fighting, community relations, and safety,” Loucks said. “They’re also expected to be mediators and therapists.” She wanted to help both the officers and the patients, and so developed a training program not only for the local police, but eventually for people who worked security throughout her city of Orange, California. What started off as a local community initiative eventually grew, and through the use of training videos the program is now being used by police departments throughout her state and is also available by request to departments across the country.

In […]

Amy M. Collins, managing editor2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 22nd, 2016|nursing perspective|0 Comments

The Bigger Picture: A New Nurse Embraces Her Ability to Still Ask ‘Why?’

Sarah Szulecki, BSN, RN, is a telemetry nurse at a hospital in New York State.

karen eliot/flickr

As a new graduate nurse, I’ve found that adjusting to the microcosm of the hospital floor—its SBAR reports detailing a ‘here and now,’ its constant exchange of admissions and discharges, its wide spectrum of emotional extremes—has been challenging.

The experienced nurses on my telemetry floor tell me that it generally takes about one full year to start feeling as though you know what you’re doing. In the meantime, I find myself catching glimpses of scenes I hope I’ll someday be able to handle with grace—rather than with my current bumbling clumsiness.

A patient’s granddaughter is escorted into the hallway as staff flocks to her grandmother’s code blue, and I think of all the wrong things to say as she starts to cry.

As I examine his excoriated skin, a depressed patient looks humiliated and struggles to tell me that his home is infested with bedbugs—in my gut, I feel a grim helplessness about his future when he’s discharged a few days later.

A patient who has a sky-high hemoglobin A1c level admits that he has neither the desire nor the money to care for his diabetes. My pleas for change sound childish and naive to even my own ears.

These first few months of being a nurse amalgamate feelings of failure and […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 17th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments

American Heart Month: Education, Awareness Crucial to Fight Heart Disease

beating heart still © American Heart Association

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed the first ever American Heart Month: “It is essential to the health and well-being of our nation that our citizens be made aware of the medical, social, and economic aspects of the problem of cardiovascular diseases, and the measures being taken to combat them.” Cardiovascular diseases has to be treated every day by doing exercise, there´s plenty of exercises you can do to better your health, one of the best ones I know is boxing but there is Some things you’ll need for boxing before you even start practicing.

The tradition has continued every February since then, and the need to raise awareness about cardiovascular health remains urgent: heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 610,000 Americans die of heart disease each year.

Women may be particularly at risk, both because the warning signs of heart disease can be different for women than for men and because of common misconceptions about heart disease risk, such as the idea that heart disease only affects men or older adults. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) kills one in three American women—but the American Heart Association (AHA) says 80% of those deaths could be […]

Diane Szulecki, editor2018-02-06T10:21:39-05:00February 11th, 2016|Nursing, Patients|1 Comment

Workplace Bullying: One Medical Center’s Nurses Assess and Respond

photo by Ronald Keller

Bullying against or by nurses has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Aside from the suffering bullying inflicts on its victims, research tells us that bullying (which takes a number of forms, from overt insults to more subtle acts that undermine and demoralize) can also endanger patient safety and quality of care.

As described in our February article, “A Task Force to Address Bullying“ (free access until March 1), recently a large Magnet-designated academic medical center in the Northeast developed an initiative to evaluate and address the issue at their institution. In order to first measure the problem, the task force developed a confidential online survey.

The survey had a 38% response rate. Here are some of the findings about who’s doing the bullying, who’s suffering it, and how its victims are affected by it:

. . . . two-thirds (66%) of respondents reported having experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace; and ‘bullies’ were most frequently identified as staff nurses (58%), followed by physicians (38%), patient care technicians (34%), and nurse managers (34%). Among the individuals who reported having been bullied, more than half experienced the following personal consequences: loss of confidence (63%), anxiety (59%), and diminished self-esteem (50%); and more than half experienced the following work consequences: decreased job satisfaction (83%), decreased […]

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Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:01:29-05:00February 9th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments