Off the Charts

As the VA Regroups and Recruits, The Words of Nurses Who Served

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City who is currently doing a graduate placement at AJN two days a week. The AJN articles linked to in this post will be free until the end of December.

Vietnam Women’s Memorial, courtesy of Kay Schwebke

A scandal earlier this year about suppressed data related to long wait times for appointments tainted the credibility of the Department of Veterans Affairs. On this Veterans Day week, the new secretary of Veterans Affairs has been using incentives and promises of culture change to promote new hiring initiatives for physicians and nurses. The focus as always should be on the removal of the barriers many veterans face in obtaining timely, high quality care. Naturally, a number of these veterans are nurses themselves.

To commemorate those who have bravely cared for our country, and who deserve the best of care in return, we’ve compiled a few quotations from nurse veterans who’ve written for or been quoted in AJN about their experiences in successive conflicts through the decades. Thank you for all your service, and for what you carry daily—as nurses, veterans, and patients.

World War II
“I remember walking through cities leveled by bombs, looking at the hollow eyes and haunted faces of a devastated […]

Amanda Anderson, MPA, MSN, RN2016-11-21T13:03:32-05:00November 14th, 2014|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments

Ebola Changes You: Reflections of a Nurse Upon Return from Liberia

By Deborah Wilson, RN. The author is currently an IV infusion therapist with the Berkshire Visiting Nurses Association in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and is completing her BSN at UMass Amherst. In October, she returned from Liberia, where she worked with Doctors Without Borders at a 120-bed Ebola treatment center. Names of patients mentioned in the article have been changed to protect patient privacy.

At the cemetery, newly dug graves

I have recently returned from Liberia, where I worked as a nurse for six weeks along with a dedicated team of physicians, nurses, and other professionals, treating 60 to 80 Ebola patients a day. My 21-day transition time is recently over and, although I am back at work and school, my heart is with the West African nurses who I worked with for those weeks in September and October.

I worked in a town called Foya, managing a 120-bed Ebola treatment center (ETC). During the first two weeks, I wondered if I would last. In the grueling heat, dressed up in all that personal protective equipment (PPE), constantly sprayed with chlorine, each day I was haunted by the question of whether I’d somehow gotten infected.

It all took its toll. Twice a shift the nursing team would put on PPE and enter […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:03:33-05:00November 12th, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|19 Comments

Focusing Nurses on Long- and Short-term Health Needs of Veterans and Their Families

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

I’m always humbled when I speak with veterans or families of veterans. The commitment to duty of the military and the sacrifices their families make—long periods of being single parents; nerve-racking times wondering after the well-being of a spouse or child; missed birthdays, graduations, and milestones—never cease to amaze me.

Last October, nurse Linda Schwartz, at the time commissioner of Veterans Affairs for Connecticut, spoke at the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) meeting about the health needs of veterans.

As we pointed out in a blog post about the meeting, she emphasized “the importance of knowing whether a patient has a military service history because many health issues may be service associated. For example, toxic effects from depleted uranium and heavy metals such as those found in ordinance or from exposure to agents like Agent Orange may not manifest themselves for years.” […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:03:34-05:00November 11th, 2014|Nursing|1 Comment

A Nurse’s Legal Duty to Discern Potential Harm and Protect Patients

Illustration by Janet Hamlin for AJN.

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

The November installment of AJN’s Legal Clinic column by nurse and attorney Edie Brous, “Lessons Learned from Litigation: The Nurse’s Duty to Protect,” describes a case in which nurses were held responsible for not adequately protecting a sedated patient from a sexually predatory physician. The case description begins this way:

NX was a young woman who underwent a laser ablation of genital warts at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City. While still under the effects of general anesthesia, she was transferred to a small, four-bed section of the recovery room. Shortly after her admission to the recovery room, the nurses admitted another patient to a bed two feet away from NX. The curtains were not drawn and there were no patients in the other two beds.

A male surgical resident, Andrea Favara, entered the recovery room wearing Cabrini scrubs and Cabrini identification. Residents were not directly assigned to the recovery room and were seldom called there. The nurses knew all of NX’s physicians but did not know Favara; he wasn’t one of NX’s physicians . . .

The details that follow are disturbing. After describing the case and the failure of nurses to confront this unknown physician or actively monitor his […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2017-06-22T18:59:56-04:00November 7th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments

Nurses, Brittany Maynard, Methods of Hastening Dying: No Easy Options

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City who is currently doing a graduate placement at AJN two days a week.

Last weekend, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard died, in her bed, in her bedroom, with her husband and immediate family beside her. I learned of her death on Twitter, along with millions of other readers. Several weeks earlier, Maynard had publicly announced, in a YouTube video, the way she planned to end her own life: using a lethal dose of medications prescribed to her for that purpose.

Maynard, while a compelling public advocate, is not the first to choose to die this way. Compassion and Choices, the organization that worked with Maynard to publicize her choice, lobbies for the drafting and passage of “death with dignity” laws, which currently exist in some form only in Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New Mexico, and Montana. ~~Arizona~~.

In Oregon, where Maynard moved in order to be able to legally end her life before she was incapacitated by the effects of terminal brain cancer, approximately 71 other people made the same choice in 2013, the most recent year of reported data—the peak of a gradual increase from the law’s inaugural year of 1998, when 16 people did so.