Off the Charts

Evening Shift, Christmas Eve: A Nursing Memory

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

One of my fondest memories of working Christmas Eve was after an evening shift at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. This was at the “old Bellevue Hospital,” when it still occupied a series of red brick buildings along the East River.

I had finished my evening shift in the ER, which was one of the busiest in the nation. It had been a crazy–busy night and I was too wired to just go home and sleep, so I decided to stop in the chapel for midnight mass. I was surprised to see my friend Helen there, since she was Jewish. I knew Helen always volunteered to work over the Christmas holiday so those who celebrated could be with their families, but I didn’t know that after work she’d go to the chapel to listen to the Christmas music, which apparently she loved.

We sat together, enjoying the quiet, calm pace of the service and the music. Helen knew all the words and sang along; she had a beautiful voice. Staff, visitors, and some patients (wearing the classic blue-and-white-striped Bellevue bathrobes—like draw sheets, these were hard to come by) shuffled in and out during the hour, clinicians sometimes leaving hurriedly after being summoned by a beeper.

Illustration for “A Change of Heart,” AJN, December, 2014, by Lisa Dietrich

On the way out […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2016-11-21T13:01:39-05:00December 23rd, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|7 Comments

Protect Yourself, Protect Your Career: Get Informed About Nurse Licensure

Edie Brous, JD, MS, MPH, RN, is a nurse and attorney in New York City and the coordinator of AJN‘s Legal Clinic column.

By Daniel X. O’Neil/via Flickr

I just came back from speaking at a conference where I had the same experience I have every time I speak with nurses about licensure issues. Participants say I am telling them things they didn’t know before.

Nurses who have been in practice for decades didn’t know their state requires nursing board notification of name or address changes within a certain number of days. They didn’t know that criminal convictions, even unrelated to nursing practice, can lead to disciplinary action on their nursing licenses. They didn’t know that it is considered professional misconduct to default on child support payments. They didn’t know that discipline in one state can result in discipline in another state, even when the license in that second state is inactive or expired.

Misconceptions about state boards of nursing. Many nurses do not understand the mission of the nursing board and think that the board is supposed to be an advocate for individual nurses or for the nursing profession. In fact, the board’s mission is to protect the public. Members of the board of nursing are not there to advocate for you, but to protect the public from you when […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:01:39-05:00December 18th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments

Has the Future of Nursing Report Made a Difference?

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I went to Washington, DC, for a meeting convened to hear whether implementation of recommendations from the Institute of Medicine’s (now renamed the National Academy of Medicine, NAM) 2010 report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, had indeed made a difference for nurses and the nursing profession.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which sponsored the report, had also provided support to AARP’s Center to Champion Nursing in America to coordinate a “campaign for action” and manage the work of 51 state action coalitions. Five years later, RWJF asked the National Academy of Medicine to review and report on its progress.

In brief, the evaluation committee said that things were improving for nursing and that nursing needs to focus on three major themes:

communicating and collaborating with groups beyond nursing
improving diversity
getting better data

[…]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2016-11-21T13:01:39-05:00December 17th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|5 Comments

Electronic Health Records: Still-Evolving Tools to Help or Hinder Nurses

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

Photo by Marilynn K. Yee/New York Times/Redux

One of my earliest memories of electronic health records (EHRs) is the day I had to review a chart at another hospital in the city. As I headed over to medical records, I expected at worst a “big” chart—one of those 15-inch stacks of multiple folders from a long hospitalization. I wasn’t allowed access to their system to view the chart online, so I was escorted into a separate room, in which the printed-out chart was waiting for me.

But their electronic chart wasn’t “printer-friendly,” and the hard copy version now consisted of thousands of pages of documentation spread out over a nine-foot long table. Many of […]

Betsy Todd, MPH, RN2016-11-21T13:01:40-05:00December 14th, 2015|digital health, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments

Inside an Ebola Treatment Unit: A Nurse Shares Her Experiences in Liberia

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“It is extraordinarily difficult to establish an IV line in a dehydrated patient by generator-powered light while double gloved, with one’s goggles fogging.”—Deborah Wilson

In one of this month’s CE features, “Inside an Ebola Treatment Unit: A Nurse’s Report,” author Deborah Wilson offers readers a rare look from the frontlines of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Her stories about her patients and colleagues are as compelling as they are informative. Here’s a short overview of the article:

In December 2013, the first cases of the most recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD; formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever) emerged in the West African nation of Guinea. Within months the disease had spread to the neighboring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The international humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; known in English as Doctors Without Borders) soon responded by sending staff to set up treatment centers and outreach triage teams in all three countries. In August 2014, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international public health emergency.

In September 2014, the author was sent by MSF to work as a nurse in an Ebola treatment unit in Foya, Liberia for five weeks. This article describes her experiences […]

Share this:
Facebook
Bluesky
X
LinkedIn

Guest Author2017-07-27T14:39:21-04:00December 11th, 2015|infectious diseases, narratives, nursing perspective|4 Comments