Loss from Nurse Attrition Goes Deeper than Numbers

On watching familiar colleagues leave your unit. 

Photo by Javier Allegue/ Unsplash

It feels as though every week, I hear of yet another one to two colleagues who are leaving our pediatric ICU (PICU).

Reasons colleagues leave.

They’ve been at all kinds of experience levels. Some have only been in our unit for a couple of years, and some have been with us for anywhere from eight to 15 years. Some leave because they realize as young nurses that they don’t want to be around so much pediatric death and dying in the long-term, so they move on to other positions where they can care for healthier populations. Some leave because they’ve already been around so much pediatric death and dying for so long by now that it’s time to practice in different kinds of spaces for their own mental and emotional well-being. Some leave for the significantly higher pay offered by travel nurse positions, and some leave to be closer to family in other states. A smaller percentage leave quietly without ever really disclosing the reasons why.

Every departure hurts on a numbers level.

In a time when nurse staffing seems to be at critically low levels everywhere, raising our workload and stress levels to new all-time highs, every departure hurts on a […]

2022-06-29T10:48:07-04:00June 29th, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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July Issue: Yoga for Patients with Psychiatric Illness, What We Know About Long COVID, More

“We have studied elder mistreatment for decades. . . We wait for it to happen and then find those to blame. What if we started from a position of prevention?”—Guest editorial, “Elder Mistreatment Prevention Rounds in Nursing Homes”

The July issue of AJN is now live. Here’s what’s new. Some articles may be free only to subscribers.

CE: An Evidence-Based Yoga Practice for Hospitalized Adults on Medical–Psychiatric Units

This article—winner of the 2021 Nurse Faculty Scholars/AJN Mentored Writing Award—describes a project in which nurses used structured yoga sessions for patients with psychiatric illness to provide stress relief, promote relaxation, reduce anxiety, and improve quality of care.

AJN Reports: Long COVID: What We Know Now

An overview of this emerging health issue—and what’s being done to study and address it.

Evaluating the Impact of Smartphones on Nursing Workflow: Lessons Learned

The authors compared nursing perceptions, satisfaction, task efficiency, and interruptions before and after introducing the use of hospital-issued smartphones in a pediatric ICU and a satellite ED.

[…]

2022-06-27T08:52:40-04:00June 27th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Becoming an NP: The Growing Issue of Finding Clinical Placements

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While weighing the decision to become an NP, I thought about the time and money it would take to get into and through the program. I was very interested in the subject of psychiatry and thought it was a good fit for my personality and skill set. I found a program that worked for my schedule and budget and was able to complete the program. I’ve now been in practice for two years. What I didn’t have to worry about when I weighed the pros and cons of becoming an NP was where I would do my practicum or clinical rotations. That’s because the school I attended arranged those for me. However, many NP students are not as fortunate.

The growing difficulty of finding a placement.

Like many colleagues, I have been contacted by students on multiple occasions who are trying to arrange their own clinical placement. There are also numerous posts on message boards and social media from students pleading for someone to take them on at their clinical site. Students have reported having to sit out multiple semesters or not being able to graduate because their schools have left them with the responsibility of securing these arrangements on their own. Others report driving several hours to attend sites far from home or even moving temporarily to get to a practicum site.

One would expect that, when paying thousands of dollars in tuition, the school collecting this money would include the responsibility […]

2022-06-23T10:36:29-04:00June 23rd, 2022|Nursing|1 Comment
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What Happened to Wonder? A Nurse Looks Back

This month’s Reflections essay is by Britni Busfiield, who is an RN on the progressive care neuro/trauma unit at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In this one-page essay, she writes about an experience during her last year of nursing school in which she observed a cerebral angiogram conducted on a patient with a suspected aneurysm.

While very little happens in the essay in any dramatic sense, we felt that we should publish it because it touched on a range of experience that is easily forgotten by those who work in health care, and by everyone else as well.

Wonder: easy to forget, difficult to convey.

The best word for this type of experience might be wonder—when technology illuminates the hidden structures of a complex and often mysterious organ like the brain; when a medical team works with seamless coordination as the patient whose fate may rest in the balance lies shrouded at their center and the physician speaks to her as he threads a catheter into her brain. She writes:

The screen lit up. Bright white fluid leaked slowly into the intricate map of vessels across the display. The dye flooded in like a drop of paint in water, dancing its way through each vein […]

2022-06-20T11:40:41-04:00June 20th, 2022|nursing students|0 Comments
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Progress in Dementia Care as Treatments and Prevention Lag Behind

Chair exercise class at the Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Photo courtesy of the Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center.

Dementia has long been a diagnosis dreaded by patients and families, as there is no cure. Despite decades of effort, scientists have had little success in developing effective treatments or methods to prevent or slow down the characteristic brain deterioration.

Nearly 6 million people in the United States, including about 14% of the population ages 71 years and older, are afflicted. Dementias, including Alzheimer disease, are among the most common causes of disability and dependency in older adults and projections of the actual number of Americans with dementia—as much as 13.8 million by 2060—suggest rapid growth as the population ages.

Some progress, however, has been made in understanding symptoms and progression of dementias. Recent studies have also shed light on potentially modifiable risk factors, identified new methods of diagnosis, and explored ways to slow disease progression and improve patients’ quality of life. Among these […]

2022-06-15T10:13:05-04:00June 15th, 2022|family caregiving, Nursing|0 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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