Off the Charts

AJN – More Than ‘Just’ a Print Journal

An overview from our editor-in-chief of what you can find on AJN’s home page.

As many of you might know, the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) has been providing nurses with information since 1900, when AJN first appeared in nurses’ mailboxes. Now, when people want information, they’re more likely to head online and search for information.

Print subscriptions at many publications have declined, supplanted by the demand for online content, and most journals, AJN included, have been part of this trend. Many journals now have interactive sites hosting not only the monthly or weekly journal issue content, but supplemental digital content that includes videos (for practical, “how to” information, you can’t beat videos to show step-by-step procedures), webinars, and podcasts (and of course, links to blogs and other social media channels).

So for those of you who may not have visited us in a while (or, who knows, maybe never!), here’s a summary of what you can access on AJN’s website, AJN Online.

On the home page, you’ll find the journal’s featured articles for the month. Most of these, including the CE article or articles of the month, are usually free to read.

Under the Articles & Issues tab at the top left of the home page, you can find the archives, including every issue published since the first issue in October […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2021-08-04T08:24:48-04:00August 4th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments

A Plea for Help in Making Nursing Sustainable

by Casey Horner/via Unsplash

My hairdresser made a comment that I hear from a lot of people who are not in health care.

“I don’t know how you do a full 12-hour shift when it’s life-and-death work. I mean, I have long days working too, but cutting and styling hair isn’t life and death. I just can’t understand how you do it.”

I smiled and shrugged, as I usually do.

“Thanks for recognizing that. I don’t know. We get used to it, and we have a certain flow at work, even when it gets crazy. Plus it cuts down on the number of days I have to commute to work since I get so many hours in in one day.”

I had so much more to say, but that wasn’t the place for it. This is.

It’s true that at our core, we nurses are just wired to do this kind of work and we can push through it beyond a standard eight-hour work day. It also works well for consistency in ICU patient care to only have one changeover of the patient’s nurse from one 12-hour day shift to the incoming 12-hour night shift. We have generally found ways to ride the waves of an especially high census mixed with especially sick patients, typically followed by […]

Hui-wen Sato, MSN, MPH, RN, CCRN2021-08-19T16:46:41-04:00July 29th, 2021|health care policy, Nursing, nursing career, Public health, safe staffing|5 Comments

AJN August Issue: Studying Nurses’ Well-Being and Resilience During the Pandemic, Much More

“If there is any group that needs a day at the beach, it’s nurses.”—editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her August editorial, “Nursing Is No Day at the Beach”

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

Original Research: Well-Being and Resilience Among Health Care Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Study

The authors of this study surveyed health care staff (58% nurses) in June and July 2020 to identify modifiable environmental factors in the workplace that affect well-being and resilience.

CE: Monitoring Adult Patients for Intolerance to Gastric Tube Feedings

An overview of recent guidelines and best practices for the care of enterally fed adults.

AJN Reports: School Nursing During a Pandemic

How COVID-19 introduced new challenges for school nurses—and what may lie ahead this fall.
[…]

Diane Szulecki, editor2021-07-26T08:41:44-04:00July 26th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments

Finding Perspective In an Ancient and Fabled Landscape

“Negativity and angst dissolved. Silence seeped into our spines, relaxing our amplified neural conversations and untying cranky muscles. We were just two insignificant human specks surrounded by a massive, glacier-carved swamp; its deep bowl filled with the layering detritus of millennia…”

The above quote is from the July Reflections essay in AJN. We’ve been running this column for decades, each month a one-page personal essay by a different outside author, many but not all of them nurses.

The author of “Of Swamps and Pandemics” in July (free until August 20) is Pamela Sturtevant, a nurse in Massachusetts. She writes deeply and well about a simple thing: taking a walk with a companion in an ancient and fabled swamp during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taking refuge in ‘deep time.’

While the most frightening surges of the coronavirus may be in the past, and the initially bewildering and all-powerful virus has been tamed by vaccines and precautions if not vanquished, our world hardly feels more stable than it did a year ago. Smoke from wildfires 3,000 miles to the west recently tinted a sickly yellow the air of states in the Northeast. […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2021-07-22T10:49:19-04:00July 22nd, 2021|Nursing, nursing stories|2 Comments

A Proposal to Ensure Patients Don’t Fall Through the Cracks

As a retired RN who was certified in medical-surgical nursing, I remember the goals of the hourly rounding policy. Our patients were reassured to find out that staff would check on them every hour at a minimum for any needs they might have, and families could rest easy knowing their loved ones would not be ignored. Hourly rounding also helped prevent a patient from falling through the cracks on a busy shift—always my biggest fear, and one that would keep me up at night.

Obstacles to hourly rounding in acute care.

I also remember the challenges to this policy. Because in hospitals we are dealing with humans and not machines, unlike in factories, there are countless variables to sabotage our best efforts. Everyone has heard the line from the Robert Burns poem, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

The patient variables are unique to each primary nurse and her patient care technician (PCT) who have a plan to alternate rounding on those in their care: the patient who codes, the hemorrhaging post-op patient, the incontinent patient, and the cancer patient with intractable pain. The list is endless—situations that keep the primary nurse or PCT tied up in a room during their turn to do hourly rounds.

Some hospitals may have instituted tracking systems […]

Guest Author2021-07-15T10:28:41-04:00July 15th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments

An overview from our editor-in-chief of what you can find on AJN’s home page.

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Taking refuge in ‘deep time.’

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Obstacles to hourly rounding in acute care.

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