May 24, 2013. Moore, Oklahoma. One of 41 American Red Cross emergency response vehicles roams through a neighborhood affected by the storm. The Red Cross volunteers deliver food, water, and relief supplies to […]
AJN’s July issue is now available on our Web site. Here’s a selection of what not to miss.
On our cover this month, U.S. Air Force first lieutenant Georganne Hassell is photographed during a presence patrol in Qalat City in southern Afghanistan. According to a 2011 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs report, America’s Women Veterans: Military Service History and VA Benefit Utilization Statistics, by 2035, women will make up 15% of all living U.S. veterans. For more on the health issues of women troops and women veterans, see this month’s editorial.
And for an overview of how to recognize and assess veterans’ unique health care issues, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), military sexual trauma, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury, see our continuing education (CE) feature “Enhancing Veteran-Centered Care: A Guide for Nurses in Non-VA Settings.” This article, which also lists useful resources offering tools, educational materials, and veteran services, can earn you 3.1 CE credits. If you’re reading AJN on your iPad, you can listen to a podcast interview with the authors by clicking on the podcast icon on the first page of the article. The podcast is also available on our Web site.
The prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is estimated to be around 5% to 10% in North American, and it is diagnosed more often in people under the age of 50. No single drug effectively relieves all IBS symptoms. “Managing […]
Dept. of Bad Ideas..
By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor
Keeping up with the Web-sters. If you happen to use a Web reader of any sort to collect updates (feeds) from all your favorite nursing blogs and health care news sources in one place—we ran an article on using RSS feeds a while back, “RSS for the Uninitiated,” which will be free for the next month—you may know that Google Reader, long a convenient choice, will soon no longer exist. Here are 10 alternative readers you might want consider as replacements (and if you don’t use a reader already, you might want to try it).
A new kind of nursing blog. Nurse, artist, blogger Julianna Paradisi, who writes a monthly post for this blog, has just launched a new blog that will be narrated by a fictional nurse called Niki. This sounds like a really great idea that could go in a lot of potential directions.
Lyme disease continues to grow as a health threat in leafy environments further and further afield. It’s insidious, can attack the body in multiple ways, and there’s a huge amount of controversy about whether conventional short-term antibiotic treatments actually wipe it out or not. Many argue that it can be chronic, and that it’s often missed by the tests most often used to detect its presence. This article in the New Yorker gives a really good overview […]
By Diane St. Denis, a retired ER nurse and a Red Cross Services advisor for the state of California. These are a number of brief excerpts from e-mails she sent to colleagues and friends and family as she was deployed to Oklahoma. They have been very lightly edited to capture the experience involved in having to rapidly respond to a disaster: exhaustion, people converging from all over, what it takes to bring order out of chaos and then be interrupted by a fresh onslaught of damaging and dangerous tornadoes; meeting with both gratitude as well as distrust of outside help from very independent local people, condoling those who have lost everything. For other posts in this series by Red Cross volunteers in the Oklahoma City area where the tornadoes struck in May, please click here.
May 22: I was called up to go to Oklahoma. I slept thru my alarm . . . and rushed to get to my plane, empty stomach, no coffee or tea. We landed about 10 minutes late, so I ran from terminal C to terminal B in Salt Lake City. I ran into some other Red Crossers in Salt Lake City as we were boarding the plane.
Finally, after driving around in roll & go freeway […]
Thelma Schorr and Kathryn Brownfield
By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
Last week I had the opportunity to meet several members of the National Student Nurses Association (NSNA) board of directors when they were here in New York for a board meeting. As is custom, NSNA chief executive officer Diane Mancino invites many of the NSNA sponsors and supporters to dinner to meet the new board.
I had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Brownfield, the nursing student editor of Imprint, the NSNA’s official publication. She’s a nursing student at Nash Community College in North Carolina. We sat with Thelma Schorr, AJN’s former editor and publisher (and a consulting editor at Imprint) and Florence Huey, a former editor of AJN and of Geriatric Nursing (and a former president of the NSNA). It was like homecoming!
I was impressed—as I always seem to be—with these aspiring nurses. Many of them are second-degree students and come into nursing with work experience, a family, and a maturity that was lacking in my cohort, which was largely younger, right out of high school, with little work experience.
I wonder how these nursing students will fare in their first nursing jobs. One hears a lot about bullying and lateral violence and how it’s driving some new nurses away. I can’t imagine any of the students I met being cowed by overbearing coworkers.
In November, NSNA will host its mid-year conference, which typically draws 1,500 attendees; this year, it will […]