What You May Not Know About Nurse Licensure

This month’s Legal Clinic installment in AJN is called “Common Misconceptions About Nurse Licensure.” Author Edie Brous, a nurse and attorney, lists these misconceptions:

  • 1. Nursing boards are nursing advocates. Not so, says Brous; they’re there to protect the public. “Because nurses care for vulnerable populations, the state that issues a nursing license has a social contract with the public to ensure that the licensee is qualified, competent, and ethical.”
  • 2. Private Conduct Isn’t Relevant to One’s Performance in a Professional Capacity. In fact, it can matter to a nursing board. The reasoning: “Conduct that reflects questionable judgment, impairment, or lapses in moral character may suggest to the board that a nurse poses a potential threat to the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” Ever neglect payment of student loans, child support, or taxes; have a substance abuse problem; commit a crime? It might be relevant.
  • 3. Disciplinary action taken by a state pertains only to that state. Not so: there’s a computerized system called Nursys (Nurse System) where nursing boards enter actions they take against a nurse and learn about actions taken elsewhere.
  • 4. Licensure is a right. “Rights are entitlements that are considered inherent and inalienable so they cannot be revoked, but privileges are granted by the state and are therefore conditional. As such, a nursing license may be restricted or revoked upon determination that the license holder poses a risk to the public.”

The article goes into more detail […]

2016-11-21T13:09:05-05:00October 19th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|9 Comments
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BRCA Gene Mutations: Knowing You’re At High Risk for Cancer

‘Autumn Washed Away,’ Diane Hammond/ via Flickr

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. We thought we’d do our part with a feature article to help increase nurses’ awareness of some of the issues faced by women who find they are at high risk for breast cancer.

In the October issue, author Rebekah Hamilton describes her research with young women who learn they have a BRCA gene mutation that puts them at greater risk for cancer, especially breast and ovarian cancers. “Breast cancer risk ranges from 50% to 85% by age 50 in women with the mutation and is 12% in women without it.” Her study explores the consequences this knowledge has on decisions these women make about their future, especially those related to prophylactic surgery, relationships, and childbearing, and offers some recommendations for practice. The abstract is below, but I urge you to read the study, especially if your patients include young women.

Objective: Women who carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation face a risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer at an earlier age than women without such a mutation. Relatively little is known about the psychosocial consequences—especially regarding marriage and childbearing—in young women who test positive for one of these mutations.

Methods: In 2006, participants were recruited from Web sites for women with breast cancer or BRCA gene mutations. Forty-four women ages 18 to 39 from 22 states and Canada […]

2016-11-21T13:09:06-05:00October 15th, 2012|nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Can’t Even Think About It: An ICU Nurse’s Personal Taboo

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May issue of AJN.

The weekend was busy in the ICU; several critically ill trauma patients were admitted in quick succession and the unit was filled with grieving families. The air was heavy with tragedy and misery, and it was draining to work under such weight.

I had a single day off, which didn’t feel like enough, and when I returned to work there were new patients in the beds and the mood in the unit had drastically changed. Disarming, but not surprising; the ICU is always the same and yet different.

One of the young patients from the weekend had become an organ donor, which had been anticipated and was considered a positive outcome, relatively. In discussing the weekend events and the ways in which things had resolved, one of my colleagues mentioned that, if given the opportunity, she’d embrace the chance to go to the operating room with the organ procurement team. Her beloved niece had been an organ donor and she sees organ donation as a validation and continuance of life, an ultimate example of “paying it forward.” She takes great comfort in knowing that her niece did not die in vain; lives were saved. She’d like to see, firsthand, the workings of the surgical team as they extract the organs.

“I would never do that,” […]

2016-11-21T13:09:07-05:00October 10th, 2012|nursing perspective, Patients|4 Comments
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What Do You Value?

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

“ ‘The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.’—Hubert Humphrey

These are the words that physician Donald Berwick saw as he went to work in the building that bears Humphrey’s name and houses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC. They reminded Berwick, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), of his most important mission: “to help the people who need our help the most.” And they are at the heart of an important topic of debate during this election season: what is the proper role of government in our lives?”

AJN Oct. cover, detail

So begins a blog post on the JAMA Forum by Diana Mason, PhD, RN, Rudin Professor of Nursing and codirector of the Center for Health, Media, and Policy at Hunter College, City University of New York, as well as president-elect of the American Academy of Nursing (and, for the sake of transparency, former editor-in-chief of AJN).

Her question is a critical one and one that has been a fundamental issue, tug-of-war even, for Americans. Our citizens take a great deal of pride in being independent, self-made, and self-reliant—yet it’s obvious that most of us also believe […]

2016-11-21T13:09:08-05:00October 8th, 2012|nursing perspective|4 Comments
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‘No One Ever Put the Puzzle Pieces Together’: A Nurse’s Guide to Celiac Disease

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Wheat spikes by Dag Endresen, via Flickr

If you’ve thought that celiac disease is just another disease-of-the-moment that few people actually have, this month’s CE by McCabe and colleagues, “Celiac Disease: A Medical Puzzle,” might make you reconsider. The disease is an autoimmune genetic illness that typically targets the small intestine, and it’s caused by an intolerance to ingested gluten, a complex protein found in wheat and certain other grains. Until recently, celiac disease was considered rare; but widespread serologic testing has indicated otherwise. Experts estimate that up to 1% of the U.S. population—more than 3.1 million people—are affected.

Yet celiac disease remains widely underrecognized. For one thing, clinicians are still being taught that it’s a childhood illness, although onset can occur at any age; for another, disease presentation is highly variable (there are more than 200 associated signs and symptoms). All of the article’s six authors have themselves “either personally endured or witnessed the misery of misdiagnosis.” To help raise awareness, they offer several illustrative stories, including this one:

I am a registered nurse. I was treated for irritable bowel syndrome for more than 10 years. Although I was very careful with my diet, I never seemed to get better and felt sick most of the time. One day, I was admitting an elderly woman to home care and was reviewing her many diagnoses. She told me about her celiac disease and the symptoms she’d experienced. As […]

2017-07-27T14:53:00-04:00October 5th, 2012|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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