Off the Charts

The Nightingale Immersion Experience

Susan Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Senior Advisor for Nursing, is traveling through Europe on a tour developed in honor of the centennial of Florence Nightingale’s death. This is the second of two preliminary posts she gave us last week before taking to the skies; click here for the first. Starting later today (so check back this afternoon!) with a first post from London, Hassmiller will report on her trip, what she’s learning, and why Florence Nightingale is as relevant as ever to nurses’ work today.

I’m still in immersion mode, learning all I can about Florence Nightingale—the “Lady with the Lamp” (a name Wikipedia succinctly explains)—as I get ready for my trip. What have I learned so far? Well, I’m blown away. […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:16:48-05:00July 12th, 2010|nursing history|1 Comment

Following in Florence Nightingale’s Footsteps – Literally!

On the Road with Sue Hassmiller as she traces the work of the legendary Florence Nightingale . . .

On her upcoming summer vacation, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Senior Advisor for Nursing, will be pursuing a dream to learn more about the life and work of the legendary Florence Nightingale. She’ll be traveling through Europe on a special tour developed in honor of the centennial of Nightingale’s death. In this and upcoming blog posts, Hassmiller reports on her trip, what she learns, and what it means to nurses’ work today. (Addendum: click here for the full series of posts.)

Eighteen years old and “hot to trot.” That’s what I thought I was. Having just been admitted into nursing school, I was set to change the world…one patient at a time. They tried to teach me about Florence Nightingale, but she was someone from the past…not likely to help me learn to start IVs, put in catheters, or run ventilators. If there were iPods back then, I would have used mine to avoid lessons about how Florence Nightingale changed the face of nursing forever. What an exaggeration, I thought! There was nothing to be learned from her…so I tuned out every last bit of it. […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:16:49-05:00July 9th, 2010|nursing history|23 Comments

Reflections on the Freedom to Harm Yourself

By Marcy Phipps, RN

(Identifying details of the patient and clinician mentioned in this post have been changed to protect their anonymity.)

Last week I took care of a woman who’d shot herself in the abdomen. This was the third suicide attempt she’d survived. She was physically compromised, to say the least, and was looking at a long recovery. Her despondence was palpable.

A clinical psychologist came to evaluate her and determined that she was experiencing major depression with suicidal ideations.

Usually, such patients are “Baker Acted.” In accordance with the Florida Mental Health Act, commonly referred to as the Baker Act, individuals who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or to others are held involuntarily and transferred to a treatment facility.

But because this patient stated to the psychologist that she was not only willing to seek mental health treatment, but also planned on checking herself into a facility near her home, she didn’t qualify to be involuntarily hospitalized. She was free to leave at any time.

As the psychologist explained to me, the first criterion of the Baker Act only considers whether or not the person in question is refusing treatment. According to Florida Statute 394.463, as long as said person does not refuse to be examined, the Baker Act does not apply.

Although the psychologist assured […]

Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, CFRN2016-11-21T13:16:51-05:00July 8th, 2010|Ethics, nursing perspective, Patients|3 Comments

Reading this Blog Post May Lead to Blinking

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

“VA Hospital May Have Infected 1,800 Veterans With HIV”

I came across this headline when I was looking for the latest news on the Internet. It certainly got my attention. I immediately thought to myself, “Wow, haven’t these soldiers been through enough, and now they might have HIV.” I took the bait and did what the editors of the article hoped I’d do—I clicked on the headline. Sure enough, it was not exactly accurate. Yes, there was a risk that these patients had been exposed to bloodborne pathogens due to the improper cleaning technique performed on dental instruments at a VA hospital, but there was no specific reason to think they actually had that illness. It reminds me of a cautionary tale by Peter Jacobi I came across a number of years ago that demonstrates how statistics can be manipulated by writers: “100% of those who were born in 1850 and ate carrots are now dead. So carrots obviously lead to . . . death.”

While there are worse ones out there, this is an example of how headlines are manipulated to get readers’ attention. Don’t get me wrong: proper cleaning of instruments is an integral part of patient safety and all patients should be able to trust the facility providing them treatment. But wouldn’t it be more responsible to say, “VA hospital may have exposed 1,800 veterans to infection,” since we don’t […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:16:52-05:00July 7th, 2010|Nursing|0 Comments

Requiem for New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital

A community in mourning leaves its messages

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editorial director/interim editor-in-chief

Each day, Alison Bulman walks by the closed doors of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village on her way to work as the senior editorial coordinator at the American Journal of Nursing. She has watched the number of testimonies left on the doors boarded up in April grow, as former patients leave messages of gratitude, anger, and sorrow for the loss of this 160-year-old institution. Alison thought they were worth sharing, and we agreed. So she took a great series of photos, which we’ve now collected in AJN‘s Flickr stream.

My first news story for AJN was about four nurses who worked at St.Vincent’s and who died while vacationing together. And in AJN’s first issue after September 11, 2001, we wrote about St.Vincent’s major role in treating victims and first responders after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

As a New Yorker and a nurse, I share the sense of loss felt for this venerable institution—not as much for its past as for the loss of a major health care center in a community that depended on it for access to care. The closing of the emergency department has already had repercussions: the Wall Street Journal reported on June 17 that ER visits in the surrounding hospitals were up. And midwives who practiced at St. Vincent’s were left in the lurch without physician back-up agreements […]