Different Gods, Different Ideas of Compassion: A Clergywoman’s Story of the Doctor Who Wouldn’t

Jeanine was in her 60s. She wasn’t a church member and I barely knew her. A neighbor had called me to the hospital-Jeanine’s husband was dead, and there were no family or friends at her side. Trying to get my bearings, I leaned over her and recited the words of the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd …. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil ….”

“Help me,” Jeanine moaned. Her eyes opened and then closed. I knew she was pleading for release from her pain.

“Jeanine, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I hurried to the nurses’ station. When a young nurse looked up, I asked if she could do more to relieve Jeanine’s pain.

“Nothing more to do,” she said, looking back down at an open ledger.

The above is an excerpt from the Reflections essay in the December issue of AJN. It’s by a retired clergywoman who tells of a moment early in her career that brought her face to face with a doctor who believed in a very different kind of God than her own. Click the link above to read the essay in entirety.  

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2016-11-21T13:20:26-05:00December 23rd, 2009|Nursing|0 Comments
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Helping Nurses Overcome Barriers to the Baccalaureate

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

It’s not always easy for a nurse with an associate’s degree to obtain a baccalaureate. Many may have families to care for or support. Financial and time pressures can be considerable. The part-time community college model is great when it comes to obtaining the associate’s degree, but then many who want to advance find the door closed: they can’t afford the higher tuition at a local private school offering the baccalaureate, or they can’t travel from a rural community to an urban center where a city or state school is located, or they need to do a portion of their coursework on a part-time basis. With such barriers in place, how will we ever solve the nursing shortage?

These problems are being addressed. Last week I had the opportunity to speak with several faculty from the program in nursing at Queensborough Community College (QCC), City University of New York, including Tina Iakovou and Marge Riley, both assistant professors; Anne Marie Menendez, chair of the program; and Lucy O’Leary, a “student success advocate.” The meeting took place at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City. Also present were Christine Tanner, a distinguished professor at Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), and Marilyn DeLuca, formerly of the  Jonas Center for Nursing Excellence.

We were there to discuss the unique collaboration QCC has with Hunter-Bellevue, one based on a model developed by Tanner and colleagues in Oregon. Tanner […]

2016-11-21T13:20:31-05:00December 21st, 2009|Nursing|0 Comments
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Psychodrama, and Dreams: Art of Nursing’s December Poet

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“Wife two weeps, leaves a trail of tissues, // stamps her foot, cries no one loves her,“ reports the narrator of “Psychodrama Session.”  The poem, featured in this month’s Art of Nursing, offers a vivid look at what might happen when a man in psychotherapy talks about his past; read it here.  (You’ll need to click again on “Article as PDF.”)  Though her characters are imagined, writer Joan Mazza knows the world she’s writing about. She is a licensed psychotherapist and certified sex therapist as well as a speaker and writing coach.

Mazza has been published in numerous literary and mainstream magazines, from The MacGuffin and The Hudson Review to Writer’s Digest and, yes, Playgirl. She has also written several books on the uses of dreams, including Dream Back Your Life: A Practical Guide to Dreams, Daydreams, and Fantasies (Perigree Trade, 2000), described as a dream-based approach to self-improvement. For more information, visit her Web site.

And if you’re a poet or a visual artist, please consider submitting to Art of Nursing. Read this blog post for details. Guidelines can be found here; and if you still have questions, feel free to write to the Art of Nursing coordinator (me) at sylvia.foley@wolterskluwer.com.

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2016-11-21T13:20:33-05:00December 17th, 2009|Nursing|1 Comment
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Poor Assessment of Nursing Home Residents’ Pain — What Can Be Done?

A recent study sought to find out whether relatives and caregivers (proxies) understood residents’ pain well enough to assist in pain assessment and to discover what factors affected their judgments of pain. The findings showed, however, that their reports didn’t consistently match the pain ratings of nursing home residents themselves.

It’s particularly difficult to assess pain in cognitively impaired nursing home residents. This means that there’s a lot of suffering that goes untreated. This AJN article in the December issue discusses the findings of a new study on the topic and offers some recommendations we obtained from the study authors. Here’s another excerpt:

The authors suggest that pain management in nursing homes could be improved through caregiver education, including the implementation of pain assessment education in combination with treatment. They recommend basic training for nurses and nursing assistants on pain, pain behavior, and pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic pain treatment, such as “massage, applying warmth, mobility[, and] distractions with music or story telling.” They also suggest that “treatment effects could be determined more easily using a pain observation scale.”

So check out the article, and also let us know what else can we do to more accurately assess the pain of nursing home residents.

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2016-11-21T13:20:34-05:00December 16th, 2009|nursing research, pain management|0 Comments
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Nursing Yet Again the Most Trusted Profession. So What?

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

I was catching up on my reading over the weekend and came across a press release issued December 9 by the ANA (American Nurses Association). It noted that “[f]or the eighth consecutive year, nurses have been voted the most trusted profession in America according to Gallup’s annual survey of professions for their honesty and ethical standards. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe nurses’ honesty and ethical standards are either ‘high’ or ‘very high.'”

Laudable for sure, but I keep wondering: does this matter to anyone but us? In the past eight years, has this designation helped nurses get to the policy table? Has it made key decision-makers realize that in addition to being trustworthy, nurses are also smart, skilled professionals who can be the key to cost-effective, quality care?

It’s really amazing (in an appalling sort of way): the groups among those with the lowest trust ratings—politicians and lawyers—dominate when it comes to making key decisions about health care (and about everything, actually). And we wonder why things are the way they are?

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2016-11-21T13:20:35-05:00December 15th, 2009|career, nursing perspective|3 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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