A Year of Nursing, in Photos

During National Nurses Week, a reflection on nursing in the pandemic and plans to continue spotlighting the global contributions of nurses and midwives.

Photo courtesy of Jhpiego, by way of International Confederation of Midwives.

One photo shows a proning team at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago turning a patient. The photo that accompanies this post shows a midwife in head-to-toe personal protective equipment as she provides breastfeeding counseling to a woman wearing a mask and holding her newborn in a hospital bed in Kabul, Afghanistan. A third focuses on more than 150 white clogs—each pair representing a nurse’s life lost during the pandemic—placed on the lawn outside the U.S. Capitol.

Reflections on the essential care nurses provided this year.

These are just some of the images included in the May issue’s feature article, “A Look Back at the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.” This photo-essay highlights the diverse experiences of nurses and midwives globally in the last year and the variety of ways they responded to these circumstances.

The photos depict resilience—a group of nurses and physicians with their names and smiley faces drawn […]

2021-05-07T11:05:47-04:00May 7th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Honoring Nurses—Artfully

Artwork and collage by Rebecca Moses.

They’re not your typical images of nurses—no scrubs or PPE in sight. A series of portraits by fashion designer and artist Rebecca Moses depicts nurses in their own clothes, celebrating them as unique and vibrant individuals. The paintings, which are featured on AJN‘s May cover (at left) and contextualized in our On the Cover article, are currently on display at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital in an exhibition to thank nurses for their work.

The art project got its start on Instagram.

In the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moses began posting daily portraits on Instagram of women who shared their lockdown stories with her. One woman who contacted Moses was the sister of Linda Valentino, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, chief nursing officer of Mount Sinai West and vice-president of women’s and children’s services at the Mount Sinai Health System. Valentino’s sister told Moses about Linda’s work on the front lines of the pandemic. Inspired […]

2021-05-05T09:06:32-04:00May 5th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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How I Would Prepare My Child to Become a Nurse

‘Mommy, do you like your job?’

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels

My five- and seven-year-old daughters are now old enough to understand that Mommy has a job as a nurse where she takes care of some pretty sick patients. From what I gather, their young minds really only seem to grasp that sometimes Mommy comforts her patients when they don’t feel well. As much as I would love to explain to them that my work as a pediatric ICU nurse is much more complicated and challenging than this, I also don’t mind them seeing me as someone who comforts others as a key part of my job.

But lately my five-year-old has started asking me more questions about my job: “What kind of patient did you take care of? How was your day at work? Do you like your job?” As one with a strong disdain for fluffy answers, even to a five-year-old, I’ve found myself considering how to answer her in a way that is both age-appropriate and honest.

When she asked if I liked my job, I thought about my patient writhing in agony yesterday—his loving parent present in the room—as we struggled to perform necessary interventions while also looking […]

2021-05-03T09:46:09-04:00May 3rd, 2021|Nursing|5 Comments
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On the Road Again (Sort of) with Virtual Nursing Meetings

Virtual meetings are likely here to stay, at least in part.

For the past 18 months, I’ve spent a lot of time attending virtual meetings. You name the app—Zoom, Facetime, Microsoft Teams—I’ve been on it. While I appreciate the advances that enable us to have visual as well as audio connections with colleagues, family, and friends, I do miss meeting the old-fashioned way: in person. The good news is that many people who might not have been able to attend meetings because of the travel costs are now able to “zoom-in” on meetings.

I’ve “attended” several virtual meetings this spring but messages from two of them stay with me:

The resurgence of the clinical nurse specialist (CNS).

The National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists (NACNS) had its virtual meeting with 900 attendees from 46 states. The theme was “The Resurgence of the CNS,” focusing on how the CNS has become the “go to” professional to lead quality initiatives. I recall the 1980s, when hospitals were in a cost-cutting mode and many cut the CNS role.

A decade later, reports from the National Academies of Medicine on medical errors (To Err is Human) and later, on safety and quality (Crossing the Quality Chasm) called for change, but there was no one […]

2021-04-30T08:22:25-04:00April 30th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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But Where Are You Really From?

Anne Lano will graduate from a family nurse practitioner program next month.

As a five-year-old adoptee from Korea who grew up in the primarily white world of central Nebraska, I often wished, as a child, that I could look like everyone else. Early on, I was often confused or hurt by the unthinking remarks I received. Neighborhood boys teased me about my eyes. When I was in my teens, a woman in the locker room turned  in my direction and said, slowly and loudly, “Welcome to America!” When I was sure she was talking to me, I said, “Uh, thanks! You too?!”

While I was chasing my kids around the playground, another little girl climbed up a ladder close to me. When she was eye level with me, she brightly said, “Hola!” It took me a second to realize she thought I was Hispanic, but I chuckled and, with a smile said, “Hola!” back to her. Likewise, at a friend’s relative’s house, a woman claimed that I look just like someone she knew. She searched all her photo albums to show me a picture of an Asian man who, in my opinion, looked […]

2021-04-28T09:30:57-04:00April 28th, 2021|Nursing, nursing stories|1 Comment
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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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