Off the Charts

Addressing Health Care Disparities: Best Practices for LGBT Patients

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Lawrence Johnson feeds his partner of 38 years, Alexendre Rheume. Rheume suffered from Parkinson’s dementia. Photo © Gen Silent documentary film / http://gensilent.com.

It’s arguably easier these days to identify as “queer”—lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Our society has come a long way since 1969, when the infamous Stonewall riots and other events heralded the gay rights movement. Many LGBT people can live more openly and fully as who they are. Yet this population—which constitutes an estimated 5% to 10% of the U.S. population—continues to receive often substandard health care. In this month’s CE feature, “Addressing Health Care Disparities in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Population: A Review of Best Practices,” Fidelindo Lim and colleagues explore these disparities and explain why it’s important for nurses in all practice settings to know how to address them. Here’s a quick overview.

The health care needs of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) have received significant attention from policymakers in the last several years. Recent reports from the Institute of Medicine, Healthy People 2020, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality have all highlighted the need for such long-overdue attention. The health care disparities […]

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Guest Author2017-07-27T14:46:55-04:00June 9th, 2014|Nursing|0 Comments

Preventing the Next Elliot Rodger: A Call to Push for Solutions, Despite the Obstacles

Donna Sabella, PhD, MSN, PMHNP-BC, is a mental health nurse and assistant clinical professor and director of global studies at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions in Philadelphia. She also coordinates the AJN column Mental Health Matters.

Who’s next? On May 23rd, we were once again forced to witness a scene of senseless violence. Elliot Rodger stabbed to death three men in his apartment, after which he gunned down two women and a man. Aside from the six murders, he injured 13 people, shooting some of them and hitting others with his car, before apparently shooting himself in his car.

All of this carnage from one lonely, angry, troubled 22-year-old raised in a world of relative privilege—we feel for the victims and their families, and we feel for the Rodger family as well, who appear to have done everything they could to help their son find help for his mental instability and prevent this latest tragedy from unfolding.

While perhaps comforting to family and friends of the slain, our grief and prayers for all involved and our dismay at the other horrific events preceding this one mean little when it comes to preventing the attacks of the next Elliot Rodger.

But I believe we are wrong if we think our outrage and sadness are all we have to offer. […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:04:33-05:00June 6th, 2014|nursing perspective|2 Comments

Writer or Nurse? The Costs of an Untold Story

Amanda Anderson, BSN, RN, CCRN, works in critical care in New York City and is enrolled in the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing/Baruch College of Public Affairs dual master’s degree program in nursing administration and public administration. Her blog is called This Nurse Wonders.

via Wikimedia Commons

I found myself getting annoyed with a dying cancer patient today. I don’t think this is an occurrence any honest nurse would deny, but when I could feel my blood pressure rise every time she dry-heaved, I knew it’d been a mistake to come to work this morning.

Not my proudest moment.

You see, I’ve felt my nursing self change of late, with an urge growing within me to slowly step back from the bedside, at least for a bit. Perhaps it’s school and the clarification of future goals forming in my mind, but clinical work has felt more like job-work, and this other work, this future work that largely centers on telling my nursing story, is becoming what I think of as calling-work.

Staring down at my poor patient, I realized I’d swung the balance of bedside work and calling-work too much to one side lately. I’ve been working—as a nurse—too much, and working—as a writer and a student—too little. After seven years of bedside nursing, and the joys and trials of per diem […]

Amanda Anderson, MPA, MSN, RN2016-11-21T13:04:34-05:00June 4th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|8 Comments

Time to Get Serious About ‘Handshake-Free’ Health Care?

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Tombstone handshake, from Mel B, via Flickr.

Last month in JAMA, Mark Sklansky and colleagues wrote a Viewpoint column, “Banning the Handshake From the Health Care Setting.” The article explored the idea and its feasibility, while acknowledging the importance of such rituals as handshakes in human interaction. In the end, the authors argued that it’s an idea we might need to start taking more seriously.

Is this an antisocial idea? That’s debatable, but it would certainly be a good step towards reducing transmission of infections—and one that’s probably long overdue.

It’s well known that pathogens are easily transmissible from health care workers’ hands, even if they practice hand hygiene in between seeing patients. But as the authors remind us, heath care workers are notoriously bad at doing so—they cite research showing that “compliance of health care personnel with hand hygiene programs averages 40%.”

And it’s no better in ambulatory care settings—an original research article we published in March 2013 that measured hand hygiene compliance by health care workers in an ambulatory care clinic found that, even after a campaign to improve adherence, compliance (as measured by direct observation) had only improved to between 32% and 51% at one-month […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:04:36-05:00June 2nd, 2014|nursing perspective|2 Comments

Nurses Join Fight Against Counterfeit Medicines

Click infographic to enlarge

“Fight the Fakes” is a scary article in the June issue of AJN about counterfeit medicines and the role the International Council of Nurses (ICN) has taken in the Fight the Fakes campaign to inform the public about just how common the problem is and how dangerous it can be. Here’s the opening paragraph:

In February 2012, a cocktail of salt, starch, acetone, and a variety of other chemicals was delivered to 19 U.S. cancer clinics, instead of a vital chemotherapy medication they were expecting. Earlier this year, the Daily Mirror reported on black market abortion tablets that are being sold online to young teenage girls too scared to tell their parents they’re pregnant. The pills can kill if the wrong dose is taken.

The article is by David Benton, chief executive officer of the ICN, and Lindsey Williamson, the organization’s publications director and communications officer. Below is a brief blog post they sent us to give readers an idea of what’s at stake—but we hope you’ll also go ahead and read their article, which raises issues that should concern us all as patients or health care professionals.—JM, senior editor

Fake medicines are a global problem: they are reported in virtually every region of the world. Fake medicines may include products with the wrong ingredients, […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:04:37-05:00May 30th, 2014|nursing perspective|2 Comments