Off the Charts

Advancing the Primary Health Care Mandate for Nursing: Recommended Reading from AJN’s July Issue

The July issue of AJN is now live.

To what degree are nurses familiar with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and their relevance to nursing practice? Read this month’s Original Research article, “Nurses’ Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding the Sustainable Development Goals: A Global Study,” to find out. (A mural depicting Goal 6, clean water and sanitation, is featured on the cover.)

In “Reducing Lung Injury from Blind Insertion of Small-Bore Feeding Tubes,” the authors describe a quality improvement project involving the implementation of capnography-guided small-bore feeding tube placement to reduce complications and the incidence of lung perforation in adult patients. (CE credit is available.)

The July issue also includes new installments in several series:

“Evidence-Based Decision-Making: Removing Persistent Barriers to Systematic Searching” discusses optimizing the systematic search to retrieve relevant results from the existing external evidence to answer a clinical question.
“Applying Implementation Science: Implementing the Brøset Violence Checklist in the ED” describes how a nurse-led implementation science (IS) team at a multisite health system used IS concepts, methods, and tools to implement the Brøset Violence Checklist—a tool to predict […]
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Diane Szulecki, editor2024-06-24T15:33:53-04:00June 24th, 2024|Nursing|0 Comments

Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Time in Range: Improving Data for Diabetes Management

Nursing roles in diabetes management.

A continuous glucose monitor reader (or a smartphone app) scans the sensor attached to the patient’s body for interstitial fluid glucose level and can provide data such as average blood glucose level or percentage of time spent in a target range over a given period of time.

Knowledge is power. When a person with diabetes knows their blood glucose levels, they can better self-manage lifestyle choices and medications and be an active participant in preventing complications. Glucose information can be obtained through a variety of methods. The majority of people with known diabetes receive reports on their glucose from the health care provider who is able to do lab work to obtain fasting or random blood glucose level, hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c, or just A1c) level, and urine glucose.

Nurses play an integral role to partner with the patient about their diabetes and provide education on the meaning of glucose measurement. In the outpatient setting, nurses can help the patient adjust insulin dosages and work on glucose monitoring skills and interpretation. Inpatient, nurses oversee and utilize glucose results and help with self-management skills in anticipation of care at […]

Guest Author2024-06-19T10:57:17-04:00June 19th, 2024|Diabetes, digital health, Nursing, patient engagement, Technology|1 Comment

To Address the Nursing Faculty Shortage, Start with the Pay Gap

The salary gap between clinical and faculty roles.

Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash

There is a national shortage of nursing faculty to educate the future nurse workforce. The biggest barrier to recruiting and retaining nursing faculty is the salary gap between the faculty and clinical nursing roles. Nurses routinely take pay cuts of as much as $40,000 when leaving clinical practice to teach full-time. The faculty role is vital to the health of the profession, and it is particularly important to recruit excellent educators with relevant clinical experience.

The salary gap raises a clear question: why would one choose to leave clinical practice and take a pay cut? Unfortunately, many nursing advocacy organizations have been silent on this issue, a silence that has contributed to the worsening of the nurse faculty workforce shortage. In 2023, there were 1,977 full-time faculty vacancies that were unfilled, or 7.8% of the faculty workforce. Faculty shortages are projected to worsen over the next decade as an aging faculty workforce approaches retirement.

Guest Author2024-07-23T11:30:48-04:00June 14th, 2024|Nursing, Nursing education|3 Comments

10 Lessons from Clara Barton’s Life for Living and Making an Impact

Oil painting of Clara Barton by Mathilde Leisenring, 1937.

Clara Barton lived an amazing life with extraordinary accomplishments, as a group of us recently learned on a tour retracing her steps (this will be the final post in the series). But it was an unlikely, even improbable, journey. She was painfully shy, suffered from anxiety and depression, and had to endure discrimination due to her gender, marital status, and age.

Out of these challenges, she became a teacher and started the first public school in New Jersey; was among the first women appointed to government work, serving in the U.S. Patent Office; served as a Civil War nurse; opened an Office for Missing Soldiers after the war; and remained an avid suffragette and abolitionist throughout her life.

She then started the American Red Cross at the age of 59 and convinced the International Red Cross to expand their services to disaster work. Resigning at age 82, […]

Guest Author2024-06-12T15:40:21-04:00June 12th, 2024|Clara Barton Tour 2024, Nursing, nursing history, Public health, volunteering|0 Comments

Clara Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office: Meeting a Desperate Need for Information

“I was fascinated to learn the site was discovered in 1996, saved by a government worker who was preparing the site for demolition when he discovered historical documents in the attic!”

Recognizing a need for information and meeting it.

Photo credit: Cynthia Leaver

In the course of our tour following the footsteps of Clara Barton, my admiration for her courage, confidence, and strength in character—yes, fortitude is the word that comes to mind—continues to grow. A trip to the Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington, D.C., has only added further confirmation of Barton’s character.

Early in 1865, as the American Civil War drew to a close, over 3 million men had fought, half a million died, with almost as many wounded. From a small boarding house on 7th Street in Washington, D.C., Clara Barton had been responding to those in need. In the course of her visits to military camps and hospitals to provide nursing care and other types of material support for the wounded, she had noticed bags of unread letters, many of them asking for any bit of information on the injury or death of a […]

Guest Author2024-06-11T15:32:11-04:00June 11th, 2024|Clara Barton Tour 2024, Nursing|0 Comments

Advancing the Primary Health Care Mandate for Nursing: Recommended Reading from AJN’s July Issue

The July issue of AJN is now live.

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Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Time in Range: Improving Data for Diabetes Management

Nursing roles in diabetes management.

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Like this:

To Address the Nursing Faculty Shortage, Start with the Pay Gap

The salary gap between clinical and faculty roles.

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Like this:

10 Lessons from Clara Barton’s Life for Living and Making an Impact

Share this:

Like this:

Clara Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office: Meeting a Desperate Need for Information

Recognizing a need for information and meeting it.

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