Dispatch from Melbourne: A Significant Loss for International Council of Nurses?

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Melbourne, Australia Melbourne, Australia

So this week I’ve traveled halfway across the world to Melbourne, Australia, where the International Council of Nurses (ICN) is holding its 25th quadrennial meeting. Nearly 4,000 nurses from 134 countries are expected to attend. There’s a mind-boggling number of concurrent sessions—there must be about 60 sessions each hour, offering glimpses into various  international  health problems and solutions from nurses. Chinese Nursing Association at ICN 2013 Chinese Nursing Association at ICN 2013

A river of nurses. Sunday morning was the opening plenary. I left my hotel at 8:30 am to walk to the convention center along the Yarra River, which runs through this very metropolitan city. I began as a fairly solitary walker, but was soon joined by other walkers, mostly women, all carrying the same ICN2013 conference bag, all walking purposefully in the same direction. We were mostly middle-aged and dressed in sensible walking shoes and “business casual” clothes, and must have looked like a well-dressed walking club to those biking and strolling past. I was quickly reminded that, for all our differences in language and customs, we’re all pretty much alike.

Missing this year from the Congress of Nursing Representatives, however, is the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which represents nurses from the United Kingdom. The RCN was suspended for failing to pay all of its dues and now is expected to withdraw […]

2018-03-28T10:32:41-04:00May 20th, 2013|nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Where Medicine Leaves Off

Long before we see the face, we hear the crying. Mournful, broken, it expresses general discomfort more than acute pain. In it lies the anxiety of all those children brought here against their will, made to submit to the probing of pale strangers who speak an alien tongue.

AftertheScienceIllustrationThat’s the start of the May Reflections essay, “After the Science,” by Charlie Geer, about working as a medical translator on an Episcopal church–sponsored team in the Dominican Republic. Geer, who published a comic novel in 2005, writes with sensitivity about the limits of medicine and the way the “nurses gather round, the compassion that brought them to medicine picking up where medicine leaves off.”—JM, senior editor

2016-11-21T13:07:35-05:00May 17th, 2013|Nursing|1 Comment
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Angelina, Florence, End-of-Life Care, Nursing History, Postpartum Depression: A Web Roundup

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

In the news today we have an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Angelina Jolie about her rationale for getting a double mastectomy. There are sure to be many reactions to this disclosure, with many offering praise for her frankness about her decision. There may also be some who disagree with her decision to take this preventive step because she has the BRCA1 gene, which sharply increases her risk of getting breast cancer. Jolie’s perspective seems to be one of empowerment for women rather than a sense of helplessness or sorrow. Though Jolie’s circumstances are hardly universal in terms of the cushion provided by her great wealth, it’s hard not to admire the strength it takes to see things in such a positive light: “Life comes with many challenges,” she writes. “The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.”

MarchCoverIt’s come to our attention that, in honor of Nurses Week, the American Antiquarian Society blog, PastIsPresent.org, put together an interesting collection of items related to nursing from its mid-19th century archives, leading their post with a mention of AJN‘s March cover, which featured a vintage illustration, “A Map of the Open Country of  Woman’s Heart.”

A recent post we ran about the fading away of certain nursing blogs gets a mention from PixelRN, who has […]

2016-11-21T13:07:36-05:00May 14th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Winding Down Nurses Week 2013

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

We’d be remiss not to mention Florence Nightingale during Nurses Week, especially since her birthday marks the end of the celebration. (She was born on May 12, 1820.) I often wonder what this visionary would be like if she were a nurse today—my bet is she would be a PhD and FAAN, and conducting multinational outcomes research related to nursing-sensitive indicators with grants from the Royal College of Nursing and the AARP/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Campaign for Nursing!

Nightingale never wrote for AJN, but there are some 200 stories and mentions of her in our archives. We thought we’d mark the close of Nurses Week with a comment from AJN’s founding editor, Sophia Palmer, on the occasion of Nightingale’s death in 1910. Here’s an excerpt, or read the original piece in our archives (free until next week on AJN‘s Web site).

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2016-11-21T13:07:36-05:00May 10th, 2013|Nursing|0 Comments
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Telling Patients About Staffing Levels: Transparency or Self-Interest?

ethicsscreenshotIt’s a very busy Monday. Because of chronic difficulty in recruiting staff, the unit has only three-fourths of its RN positions filled. In addition, Mary Evans, an experienced nurse who always helps less experienced staff with their patients while carrying a full caseload herself, has called in sick.

Linda Smith is 68 years old and two days post-op from hip replacement surgery. As you enter her room, 45 minutes after she first requested pain medication, you can sense her irritation—but worse than that, you can see from the grimace on her face and her guarded movements that she’s in pain. After several days of good nursing care, you’ve let her down, and you consider telling her about the staff shortage. But you wonder: Is it right to disclose today’s short staffing to Ms. Smith?

The situation above is an ethical conundrum because values are in conflict. On one hand, transparency is good and patients have a right to know about administrative factors affecting their care. On the other hand, care should stay focused on a patient’s problems, not the nurse’s.

As the article excerpt above suggests, nurse staffing is a contentious issue having to do with both patient safety and job satisfaction for nurses. We’ve covered this issue many times in the past, most recently in a blog post that got quite a few comments back in January.

But should a nurse ever tell a patient about inadequate staffing? This is […]

2018-03-13T10:49:19-04:00May 9th, 2013|Ethics, Nursing, safe staffing|7 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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