Comic Book Superheroes Meant to Raise AIDS Awareness Raise Some AJN Readers’ Ire

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

Back in January I posed the following question: “Is doing something as silly (and, to some, either sexist or demeaning) as this justified in the name of increasing awareness about a disease?” In that post, I was referring to the bra-focused tactics of a light-hearted campaign intended to raise breast cancer awareness. Along those lines, our March cover has received a lot of attention; unfortunately, not all of it has been positive.

Our goal was to draw attention to our two CE features of the month: “Every Nurse Is an HIV Nurse” and “Aging with HIV: Clinical Considerations for an Emerging Population.” As Shawn Kennedy, interim editor in chief and editorial director at AJN, points out in this month’s editorial, “AIDS awareness in this country seems to have diminished—in fact, for some, it hardly seems a concern at all. A recent CDC report on risk behavior in adolescents found that during 2007, 39% of sexually active high school students ‘had not used a condom during last sexual intercourse.’”

I asked Robert Walker to provide us with this month’s cover art after meeting him through a mutual friend. Through his comic book series O+Men, about nine HIV positive superheroes, he has been getting a lot of recognition for promoting HIV and AIDS awareness. For more information about Walker, read this month’s On the Cover in AJN, or listen to an interview with Walker on National Public Radio.

While […]

2016-11-21T13:18:50-05:00March 11th, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment
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The Mindfulness Antidote to V-Day

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

by Foton28/via FlickrI can’t resist acknowledging that dreaded day that’s coming up this weekend. Whether you are a believer in Valentine’s Day or a skeptic who thinks it was created by greeting card companies and florists, you can’t escape it. There are commercials all over TV, signs in every drug store, and now a movie with it in the title (which I had planned on seeing, until I read some reviews). My personal feeling has been that it makes single people feel lonely and pathetic and people in relationships disappointed with the ones they have. Not to mention that it’s impossible to get a good meal at a decent restaurant. A friend of mine who’s a social worker told me she’s thankful it falls on a weekend so she will be spared dealing with back-to-back appointments of heartbroken clients. 

This is the perfect time to practice my latest self-help discovery: mindful self-compassion. Christopher K. Germer, author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions (pardon the shameless product plug; neither I nor AJN has been paid off in any way!), posted an exercise on his blog during the holidays this past December that I think is a good fit for getting through this weekend (if you or someone you know finds it difficult). He suggests:

If you feel lonely […], see if you can stop and name the experience (“I’m […]

2016-11-21T13:19:21-05:00February 12th, 2010|Nursing|4 Comments
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Is the Florence Nightingale Pledge in Need of a Makeover?

By Christine Moffa, who was AJN clinical editor at the time it was written in 2010.

Authors and publishers frequently send nursing– and health care–related books to AJN in hopes we will review them. I love it, so keep on sending them. My latest read is Mystery at Marian Manor: The Adventures of Nora Brady, Student Nurse, a book for young adults. I guess you could call it a Cherry Ames for the new millennium.

At the beginning of the book is the Florence Nightingale Pledge, something I haven’t read since my graduation in 1995. I have to say it made me cringe. It’s almost as bad as when I visit my parents and see the nursing school graduation photo of me in that silly nursing cap I wore under protest. (If the men didn’t have to wear it, why did I?) If you’ve forgotten the pledge, here goes:

I solemnly pledge myself before God and presence of this assembly;
To pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully.
I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous
and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug.
I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession
and will hold in confidence […]

2016-11-21T13:19:41-05:00February 2nd, 2010|career, nursing history, nursing perspective, students|26 Comments
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Oh for a Thimbleful of Gratitude!

By Christine Moffa, AJN clinical editor

I had surgery 12/28 and spent four days on med-surg afterwards. I literally spent 3/4 of my time sleeping (bliss! oh rapture unforseen!), but *every single time* anyone came into my room for any reason (meds, IV change, turn off the freaking IV alarm, phlebotomist, housekeeping, whatever), I said “thank you.” I got the feeling I was abnormal. . . . So. How often do your pts say thank you, and does it come as a surprise when they do?

It’s been a few years since I’ve worked directly with patients, but in the past when I had a particularly tough day I would tell people that “nursing is a thankless job.” I’m talking about the kind of day when you barely had time to use the bathroom, never mind eat something, and the only feedback you heard from patients and administration was about what you didn’t get done. So when I saw a post (excerpted above) called “How often do your pts thank you?” at Allnurses.com, it hit a nerve.

The responses to the post were mixed, with some saying it’s common to be thanked by patients and others arguing the opposite. Maybe it’s regional—I’ve only worked on the East Coast, and in my experience complaints seem to get more air time than gratitude. Or maybe it’s just the times we’re living in. Either way, I’m sure most nurses would say they didn’t choose this career in the hope […]

2016-11-21T13:19:44-05:00January 29th, 2010|nursing perspective, patient engagement|7 Comments
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In Medicine as in Aviation, Communication Breakdown Leads to Fatal Errors

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

Lately I’ve had communication on my brain. I’m always amazed that we get anything done in this world at the rate that messages can get lost in translation. For instance, I recently had a phone call from a mother of two girls who was upset about a medication error involving her 12-year-old daughter. While the mother was at work, the child came home from school with cold symptoms and a temperature of 102.5. The daughter called her mother and was told to take two tablets of Sudafed, which she did. About an hour later, the babysitter picked up the younger child, age nine, from school. Concerned that her sister was sleeping unusually soundly, the nine-year-old called her mother at work. Realizing that just giving her older daughter Sudafed hadn’t addressed her fever, she told her younger daughter to wake up her sister and have her take “two Advils.” 

A few hours later the mother came home from work. As she was about to give her daughter another dose of medication before bedtime, she remarked to the children that she wished she had a combination drug containing both Sudafed and Advil so that the girl wouldn’t have to swallow four separate pills. The nin- year-old informed her that they did in […]

2016-11-21T13:20:07-05:00January 19th, 2010|nursing perspective|3 Comments
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Are We Trivializing Breast Cancer (and Demeaning Women) Even As We Raise Awareness?

Christine Moffa, MS, RN, clinical editor

I admit it. On January 7th my  Facebook status simply stated “Black.” Normally I’m not a joiner, but when I received a message from a FB friend that said the following, “This is fun put just the color of your bra in your status and send an email to the girls only and see if the guys can figure it out, it’s to raise breast cancer awareness,” I only paused for a moment. While a small part of me wondered if it was legit, I changed my status and forwarded the message on to other friends.

It seemed cute and harmless enough—until today, when I came across Donna Trussell’s article at Politics Daily. Her arguments—in which she interrogated her own feelings (as an ovarian cancer survivor) about our culture’s seeming obsession with breast cancer awareness, and distinguished between feel-good awareness and real action—made a lot of sense to me. The whole thing reminds me of the April 2009 cover of AJN (image below) featuring a piece from the Artful Bras Project by the Quilters of South Carolina, also created to raise breast cancer awareness.

We received a lot of letters about that one, both positive and negative. Either way, it does get people talking. Is doing something as silly (and, to some, either sexist or demeaning) as this justified in the name of increasing awareness about a disease?

2016-11-21T13:20:09-05:00January 18th, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment
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Nurses Express Concerns About Colleagues’ Commitment, Training

Back in November AJN clinical editor Christine Moffa posted a short anecdote. She told how she’d been at a training to give H1N1 vaccinations and encountered another nurse with apparent contempt for learning the basic facts about the virus. While it’s obvious that you can’t generalize about the state of an entire profession based on one stranger’s off-the-cuff comment, the responses to this post do indicate that the anecdote touched a nerve in some readers and that other nurses have also had similar experiences with their colleagues. Here are some brief excerpts from longer comments:

From Naomi: “If I fail a class by 1 point and go to the director of my nursing program demonstrating my professionalism, critical thinking, and self responsibility i would get a pat on the back and a registrar’s form in the hopes that I could repeat the class if there are enough seats. My 3.8 GPA allowed me gain admission into my nursing program not my professionalism, critical thinking, and self-responsibility even though those are key qualities for a good nurse.”

From Nursevon: “I am a faculty member in an undergraduate BSN program at a university in the midwest. I have become increasingly discouraged in my job as an educator. The focus of students is very short-sighted: typically on points and grades. As hard as I try to instill professionalism, critical thinking, and self-responsibility for one’s own learning, I frequently come away profoundly discouraged.”

From Richard Crosby: “Hearing a new nurse explain a drug or […]

2016-11-21T13:20:18-05:00January 6th, 2010|career, students|1 Comment
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Ignorance May Be Bliss — But It’s Certainly Not Professional

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

A few weeks ago I attended an orientation provided by the New York City Department of Health for a school-based H1N1 vaccination program. Years ago I worked as a school nurse here in New York and I thought participating in the program would be a great way to keep up some clinical skills and spend time with patients. A physician from the bureau of immunization gave an informative lecture reviewing the epidemiology, signs and symptoms, prevention, and treatment of influenza.

There were about 100 nurses in attendance, many of them new graduates who were unable to find full-time work. During a break one of the new grads said to me, “why do we have to sit through this irrelevant lecture?” I couldn’t believe it. If you’re administering a medication, I told her, of course you’d want to understand how it works and why you’re giving it. In addition you need to be able to explain it to the patient or their parent. She rolled her eyes and walked away. And I thought, once again: this is why nurses are not taken seriously as professionals.

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2016-11-21T13:20:57-05:00November 25th, 2009|career, nursing perspective, students|10 Comments
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An End to Interruptions: Nurses Preventing Medication Errors

By Christine Moffa, MS, RN, AJN clinical editor

By NathanF/via Flickr (Creative Commons) By NathanF/via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Interruptions are distracting.

I have a hard time focusing when I am repeatedly interrupted. How many times have you walked down the hall to get something, met with an unexpected request or encounter, and then found you couldn’t remember where you were going or why?

A few years ago I was working as float nurse in an outpatient facility. One of the specialties I floated to was the pediatric clinic. There were seven or eight nurses (a mix of RNs and LPNs) working at the same time, with half assigned to administering medication, mostly vaccines, and the others performing telephone triage and monitoring patients in the observation room.  I can now admit that I used to pray to get assigned to the triage section—not because giving injections was a problem, but because the setup of their system terrified me. […]

2019-04-11T14:14:07-04:00November 5th, 2009|nursing perspective, nursing research, patient safety|7 Comments
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Bring Back the House Call

But what about those who are not quite frail but are homebound due to less serious health problems? If not for the home visit, the condition of the patient described above would have declined to the point of requiring an ER visit or hospitalization. As the blogger KevinMD points out, “In-home visits could take the place of unnecessary and costly hospital stays and help prevent equally expensive re-admissions to the hospital.” Maybe it's time to bring back the house call.

2016-11-21T13:21:41-05:00October 16th, 2009|Nursing|2 Comments
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