Spotlight on the Art of Nursing

Duty, colored pencil on paper, 8” × 10”, 2021. © Isabella Calisi-Wagner.

AJN‘s Art of Nursing column this month features Duty, a drawing of a nurse who cared for New York City artist and writer Isabella Calisi-Wagner as she recovered from emergency brain surgery in 2020. Calisi-Wagner remains friends with the nurse today. She says she drew the portrait to “celebrate the dedication of nurses.”

Another recent artwork honoring nurses in AJN is Double Shift, a charcoal drawing by artist and retired RN Therese Cipiti Herron. She explains that the image captures the “essence of exhaustion” experienced by nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, referencing nurses being utilized for extended shifts and performing in crisis mode. “I salute nurses as they carry on like never before,” she says.

Double Shift, charcoal on paper, 11” × 14”, 2021. © Therese Cipiti Herron.

In the early days of the pandemic, news reports about health care workers’ lack of access to adequate PPE inspired artist Jim Leitz to paint Get Them What They Need! This work was featured in AJN‘s June 2020 issue.

Get Them What They Need!, watercolor, 5” × 5”, 2020. © Jim Leitz.

Each month in the Art of Nursing column, AJN publishes visual art and poetry related to nursing, health, and health care. Interested in submitting […]

2022-03-09T09:25:13-05:00March 9th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Taking Stock of the Nursing Profession as the Pandemic Weakens Its Hold

Projected nursing shortages by 2026, by state. Click image to expand.

Exhaustion and burnout. Insufficient workplace protections. The growth of contract nursing. A lack of minimum staffing ratios.

These and other issues have been important nursing topics since long before the pandemic. But as the essential work of nurses has come under a brighter spotlight during the COVID crisis, headlines and news stories have been increasingly highlighting these important topics, providing wider recognition of nurses’ experiences and concerns.

In just the past week, a sampling of headlines from across the country show how nursing workforce issues are taking center stage, from insufficient workplace protections in California to state legislatures considering capping travel nurses’ pay in Missouri to workforce shortages in Pennsylvania to unsafe working conditions in Maine.

Liz Seegert explores where the profession stands as the country enters the third year of the COVID pandemic in the February AJN Reports, “The Current State of Nursing.” She notes the results of recent surveys, including one by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses that looked at how the pandemic has affected nursing.

“Exhaustion, frustration, anger, burnout, depression, and fear for their own and their […]

2022-03-07T09:52:15-05:00March 7th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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A Call for a More Balanced Approach to Family Presence During a Public Health Emergency

What would you want for your family?

Nine years ago, AJN published a Viewpoint article asserting the essential role of family caregivers. The article featured an elderly woman recuperating in a hospital, her daughter at her bedside planning for discharge with the care team. The authors argued that family engagement creates the foundation for safer care, better patient outcomes, and greater efficiency for nurses.

The same patient’s experience would likely have been very different during the Covid pandemic, especially during the intermittent surges over the past two years. The patient would be alone in the hospital, her daughter’s assurances communicated through a digital tablet. Overstretched nurses would provide updates to the family over the phone. Discharge education would occur through a car window moments before the patient’s daughter drove her home, feeling unprepared for what came next.

COVID-19’s highly transmissible properties have complicated the family engagement equation. Over the past two years, hospitals and nursing homes have enacted, eased up on, and then reinstated visitation bans, at times leaving questions as to whether restrictions implemented to reduce disease spread may be more detrimental than beneficial.

As we contended in recent months with the extremely contagious Omicron variant, family caregivers who had assumed an essential role as advocate, family […]

2022-03-02T10:21:04-05:00March 2nd, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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March Issue: Assessing Movement-Evoked Pain, Medical Aid in Dying, More

“Hope may be hard to find at times, but it’s what sustains us.”—editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her editorial, “Making It Through March”

The March issue of AJN is now live. Here’s what’s new. Some articles may be free only to subscribers.

CE: Assessing Movement-Evoked Pain

This article discusses the importance of assessing pain during movement, especially in postoperative patients; what such an assessment can reveal about the intensity, impact on patient functioning, and tolerability of pain; and protocols and tools for completing these assessments.

Medical Aid in Dying: What Every Nurse Needs to Know

The author provides an overview of aid in dying in the United States—offering an illustrative case report that highlights the struggles of one patient and his family—and discusses the nurse’s role and nursing implications.

Conversations: ‘How Can Acute Care Recover from the Pandemic?’

Four nursing leaders weigh in on the challenges faced by acute care nurses today—and identify opportunities for change.

[…]

2022-02-28T09:46:49-05:00February 28th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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The Particular Pain and Challenge of Educating Patients During a Worldwide Pandemic

Working in a rural community access hospital during the pandemic has been a struggle. Here as in many areas of the U.S., many in the surrounding community have not accepted the the existence of a virus like Covid-19. Against the backdrop of this widespread disbelief in the reality of the virus, the “government-mandated” vaccine was a final straw for many.

Many of these patients wholeheartedly believe that the vaccine is the “mark of the beast” mentioned in the Book of Revelation and that this is the beginning of the end of the world, with getting the vaccine understood as an expression of loyalty to Satan.

This belief is shared by various religious groups in other areas of our country. Many patients in our community also believe the vaccine is made with stem cells and fetal tissue and includes microchips. There are widely circulated rumors of tracking devices in the vaccine itself.

How do we as nurses and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) educate patients on the science of vaccinations in the face of the anger and passion we experience daily from a suspicious community?

The many other strains on nurses.

It hasn’t helped that nurses and APRNs alike have had to deal with more than they bargained for on many levels in relation […]

2022-02-24T14:38:16-05:00February 24th, 2022|Nursing, patient engagement, Public health|0 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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