Emergency Contraception: Why It Matters and How Nurses Can Improve Access

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Unintended pregnancy can, in some circumstances, be detrimental to the health of both the women who become pregnant and the children born as a result. And such pregnancies happen far more often than you might think, accounting for nearly half of all pregnancies in this country, with even higher rates among women ages 18 to 24 and low-income women. Yet we have had the means to safely prevent such pregnancies for decades, through emergency contraception. Why isn’t emergency contraception used more often?

That’s a question author Kit Devine explores in “The Underutilization of Emergency Contraception,” one of April’s CE features. First, Devine describes the four methods currently available: conventional oral contraceptives and the copper intrauterine device (IUD)—both are used for birth control and can also be used to prevent pregnancy after intercourse has occurred—and the agents levonorgestrel and ulipristal acetate, which are FDA-approved for emergency contraception. Effectiveness ranges from 51% to 62% (for conventional oral contraceptives) to as high as 99% (for IUDs).

Known and likely barriers to their use include […]

2016-11-21T13:10:18-05:00April 16th, 2012|Nursing|1 Comment
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Friday Round-Up: When ‘Natural’ Isn’t ‘Safer,’ A Student Nurse Summit, a Walking Crisis, Chronicity

Please pardon the relative quiet of this blog this week. All our in-house and far-flung occasional correspondents are otherwise engaged, it seems. Blame the nice weather, if it’s nice where you are. Our editor-in-chief, Shawn Kennedy, is in Pittsburgh at the National Student Nurses Association (NSNA) convention. She’s presenting this afternoon (I think) on the new AJN iPad app, among other things (no, we don’t yet have one for the Kindle, but that may be on the way).

Shawn should have an update on her adventures with the next generation in nursing sometime early next week. So for now, almost entirely avoiding nursing news and health care reform, here are a few items of potential interest:

The Respectful Insolence blog, in reminding us that “natural” doesn’t always mean safer, points to an AFP article that highlights research drawing a connection between a widely used herbal remedy and the unusually high incidence of urinary tract cancer in Taiwan. Says the AFP article,

A toxic ingredient in a popular herbal remedy is linked to more than half of all cases of urinary tract cancer in Taiwan where use of traditional medicine is widespread, said a US study Monday.

Aristolochic acid (AA) is a potent human carcinogen that is found naturally in Aristolochia plants, an ingredient common in botanical Asian remedies for aiding weight loss, easing joint pain and improving stomach ailments.

While the FDA issued an alert about products containing this […]

2016-11-21T13:10:19-05:00April 13th, 2012|students|2 Comments
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Essential Nursing Resources: A Crucial Tool for Nurses Seeking Information on the Web

This nursing resource will help you find anything you need to know

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Back in the dark ages, before the Web, when I was in school and researching a topic, I would go to the university library (in Manhattan, this meant a subway ride to the main campus), fill out a form, and hand it to the librarian. After a couple of hours, I’d check back and the librarian would have pulled up to eight “on-reserve” books (no more were allowed until these were returned) from the stacks and have them waiting for me. This cycle would repeat itself several times, and sometimes I’d have to wait for an “ILL”—an interlibrary loan. Of course, if I procrastinated, the material I wanted might already have been taken out by other students and I’d be out of luck, facing a deadline with no source material.

Of course, it’s all different now with the Web. This week, even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica announced it is ceasing print production after almost 250 years and will only be available in digital format.

Now, researchers and students have virtually every article published available to them via the Internet. For nurses, there’s something called Essential Nursing Resources (pdf), an annotated listing of resources for nursing published by the Interagency Council on Information Resources in Nursing (ICIRN). 

Founded in 1960 (here’s a brief history) by […]

2016-11-21T13:10:20-05:00April 10th, 2012|digital health, nursing research|0 Comments
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Early Spring Web Roundup: Insomnia, Early Delivery, Persistence, Painkillers, Overtesting

We’ve been a little quiet here on the blog this week. Maybe it has to do with the opening of baseball season or signals a hangover from media coverage of the Supreme Court give-and-take about the Affordable Care Act last week and the endless guesses about how the court is likely to vote come June. Or maybe all our nurse bloggers are using spare time to clean out closets, sweep the cherry blossoms and sale inserts from the sidewalk, purge the inbox, box up the humidifier, watch Mad Men, or whatever. But here are a few things we’d like to draw your attention to:

If the windy spring nights wake you (or your patients) to the sound of a trash can lid flying away, maybe this will help: As described in the Drug Watch column in AJN‘s April issue, a sublingual form of the drug zolpidem (think Ambien) has now been approved, with the fancy name Intermezzo, for people who wake in the middle of the night and start hearing the same song over and over in their heads or thinking of the perfect comeback to that snippy waiter.

Also in the April issue, an AJN Reports looks at efforts to get people not to opt for potentially risky early delivery of their babies, and a Reflections essay called “Giving […]

2016-11-21T13:10:21-05:00April 6th, 2012|health care policy, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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April Apps and Other Good Things

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

April is one of those months most people like, I think—the weather becomes consistently warmer and flowers appear. And this month, we at AJN are especially delighted because we launch our very own iPad app! As a temporary introductory offer, you can download the app for free (click here, or search under American Journal of Nursing in the iTunes app store) and get the full April issue. (Eventual pricing is still being determined.)

It’s another way AJN is providing you with accurate, evidence-based information in formats that allow you to access it when and where and how you want it. Don’t forget to subscribe to our always free audio podcasts, too—there are monthly highlights and interviews with authors.

And April is a stellar issue. This month we focus on examining how we treat people with disabilities. The cover, the editorial, and two features all deal with how we need to do better in this area. In the original research article, Suzanne Smeltzer and colleagues report on their survey of people with disabilities, querying them on interactions with nurses during hospitalizations. Their findings are sobering and should serve as a wake-up call when providing care to people with disabilities when they are hospitalized.

There’s also a poignant piece, “Hard Lessons from a Long Hospital Stay,” describing the experience of one of the authors of the research article, […]

2016-11-21T13:10:24-05:00April 4th, 2012|nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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