Off the Charts

Looking Beyond Nursing Education Offerings Can Open Doors

In a world where time efficiency is supreme, nurses often seek educational opportunities only within their area of nursing expertise. After all, further expertise in my specialty area will directly apply to work, right? It may seem counterintuitive to look for learning opportunities outside nursing, but the results may surprise you.

I am a nursing PhD student, and the PhD program contains only one “independent study” elective course. One chance for me to choose my own topic. Most students choose to research background literature for their dissertation, but I chose . . . to audit a law course. My future research project involves children with special needs, and I discovered a local special education law course. School education is vitally important for families with special needs children, but the rules surrounding education are poorly understood by parents—and nurses.

Since I don’t have a law degree, I wasn’t certain how much I would understand or use the material covered in the class, but auditing the class turned out to be the best decision I could have made, yielding immediate benefits and opening doors of future opportunity.

Outside the educational comfort zone.

Initially, I felt excitement tinged with trepidation and self-consciousness. To audit a course, I needed to obtain […]

Guest Author2022-07-08T13:00:07-04:00July 8th, 2022|career, Nursing|1 Comment

Keeping Current with Cardiac Device Technologies

“If nurses understand the purpose of cardiac devices and the care of patients receiving them, they will be better equipped to teach patients to be confident in their own self-care.”

When I was an RN in the cardiac electrophysiology lab, we frequently performed device implants or procedures for patients with heart failure. When giving report to the telemetry nurses, I often felt I didn’t have enough time to fully explain the background for the procedures we performed.

In my CE feature article in AJN‘s June issue, “Guideline-Directed Cardiac Devices for Patients with Heart Failure,” I share an exemplar of a patient who had one of these procedures—an implanted cardioverter/defibrillator with cardiac resynchronization therapy. If nurses understand the purpose of cardiac devices and the care of patients receiving them, they will be better equipped to teach patients to be confident in their own self-care.

It is challenging to keep up with the advances in health care devices. In the article, I also describe some other recent cardiac technologies. Patients with any these devices may be seen in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings, and nurses may benefit from a general understanding of their purpose and patient care. […]

Guest Author2022-07-05T09:28:04-04:00July 5th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments

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 sheer […]

Hui-wen Sato, MSN, MPH, RN, CCRN2022-06-29T10:48:07-04:00June 29th, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments

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.

[…]

Diane Szulecki, editor2022-06-27T08:52:40-04:00June 27th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments

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 […]

Christine Moffa, PhD, APRN, PMHNP-BC2022-06-23T10:36:29-04:00June 23rd, 2022|Nursing|1 Comment

Outside the educational comfort zone.

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Reasons colleagues leave.

Every departure hurts on a numbers level.

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The growing difficulty of finding a placement.

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