AJN June Issue: Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, Preventing Nonventilator Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia, More

“In addition to vaccine hesitancy, there is the question of access. The pandemic has shone a bright spotlight on disparities in access to both vaccines and health care.”—editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her editorial, “Moving Forward Together”

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

Original Research: Oral Care as Prevention for Nonventilator Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia: A Four-Unit Cluster Randomized Study

The authors examined the effectiveness of a universal, standardized oral care protocol in preventing nonventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia in the acute care setting.

CE: Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy

The authors discuss the growing interest in psychedelic therapies—such as LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin—for the treatment of mental health disorders, including trauma, depression, and addiction, as well as the potential role of nursing in this emerging field.

Question of Practice: Preventing Shoulder Injury Related to Vaccine Administration

How vaccinators can avoid this potential complication of improper needle placement by using appropriate injection technique.
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2021-05-24T09:39:31-04:00May 24th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Built for This: One NP’s Revitalized Practice

March 30, 2020, was the first day working at this clinic; it was the same day I was supposed to be returning from my honeymoon in Panama.

That’s from our May Reflections essay, “Built for This,” which is free for the rest of May (along with the entire issue, in honor of Nurses Month). Written by Janey Kottler, a family nurse practitioner and clinical instructor, the essay is about volunteering at a clinic on Chicago’s West Side, which was hard-hit by Covid-19. There she encountered families placed under impossible pressure and risk by the need to keep their jobs during the pandemic.

I think about the single mother and her two children I treated recently. The mother is an essential worker at a grocery store and utilizes her neighbor for childcare during work hours. The family’s neighbors are elderly: the wife stays at home while her husband is an essential worker, working on a factory line. They were grateful to have an income throughout the pandemic until her husband fell ill after COVID exposure at work. He has now inadvertently exposed his wife and the children she babysits.

[…]

2021-05-17T12:42:41-04:00May 17th, 2021|Nursing, nursing career, nursing stories|0 Comments
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Making Sense of Loss, Finding Strength as a Nurse

Maria, day 6.

It was bright outside, the sun was shining, and as I looked at the window in Room 303, I saw the light peering through. Maria, a 78-year-old Hispanic woman, mother of three, could not move and did not see that spring had begun as she struggled to breath. She looked at me with her helpless teary eyes trying to communicate, but I could not hear the words.

I’d d been Maria’s primary nurse for five of the six days that she has been hospitalized. During that time, I had witnessed the tension and anxiety that existed within her family around her admission with Covid-19. I hoped silently that a DNR order would be initiated if her breathing worsened instead of her being placed on a ventilator. But I tried not to express my feelings to her family about this when I helped them to communicate with and see their mother using FaceTime.

Maria’s family watched as she slowly declined, and saw how she didn’t respond to treatments. Feeling hopeless and overwhelmed, I tried to schedule a time to speak to my nursing manager about how I was feeling, but she was always too busy scheduling and assisting on the floor after other staff called in sick.

Hard decisions take […]

2021-05-13T10:24:41-04:00May 13th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing|0 Comments
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Never Ever Stop Learning: Guidance for Today from Florence Nightingale

On Florence Nightingale’s 201st birthday, coming as it does each year at the end of Nurses Week—and this year after a year of unprecedented challenges for nurses around the globe—there’s no better time to revisit her career.

If she were here today, there’s no doubt she would have much to say and many insights. She helped envision a nursing that encompassed the compassion and professionalism of a skilled bedside nursing that was grounded in ethical principles, scientific and statistical evidence, and a spirit of inquiry.

In 2011, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, spent her summer vacation traveling through Europe pursuing a dream to learn more about the life and work of Florence Nightingale. In her dispatches from the road, posted one by one and collected here, Hassmiller reported on her trip, what she learned, and what it means to nurses’ work today.

Ten lessons learned from her life.

The culminating post in the series may be a good place to start, however, and to reread and contemplate as we face old challenges in ever new guises:

“Parting Thoughts: Ten Lessons Learned from Florence Nightingale’s Life”

It begins, as one might expect, with “never, ever stop learning.” We couldn’t agree more.

2021-05-12T07:10:19-04:00May 12th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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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 on the […]

2021-05-07T11:05:47-04:00May 7th, 2021|Nursing|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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