Creating a Disaster Simulation for Nursing Students

A nursing student treats a volunteer acting as a disaster victim during a high-fidelity simulation at the University of South Carolina Aiken Convocation Center. Photo courtesy of the authors.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in the United States “there were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020.” With the number of disasters increasing in recent years, preparedness is crucial.

Many simulationists may believe that creating a disaster simulation is complicated, expensive, and requires a lot of resources. The opposite is true if you have enough support from your organization and community. The only cost incurred during our disaster management simulation project for nursing students at our institution was the cost of make-up to create realistic wounds.

Finding a gap in student knowledge.

The first thing we did was to perform a needs assessment. We knew that our students were not well prepared in our program for caring for patients during a disaster. In the past, this area of content was never really addressed in our curriculum. As we […]

2024-04-08T12:03:27-04:00April 8th, 2024|disaster preparedness, Nursing, Nursing education, Public health, simulation|0 Comments
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The Many Ways Nurses Can Become Champions of Sustainability

Putting concerns about the environment into practice.

Matthew Lindsley

Matthew Lindsley, MPH, MSN, RN, PHNA-BC, is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and is engaged in clinical trials as an oncology nurse at the National Institutes of Health. He spends his weekends working the soil, caring for animals, and volunteering with a sustainable agriculture initiative to improve the quality and resiliency of local food systems in his community. He is one of a growing legion of nurses who are putting their concerns about the environment into action both inside and outside the workplace.

Our AJN Reports article in the April edition of the American Journal of Nursing, “Nurses Step Up to Address Climate Change and Health,” profiles nurses like Lindsley who are researching the effects of rising temperatures on farmworkers, educating the public about air quality, advocating for policy change, and reducing the waste and emissions generated by the health care sector. The nurses in the article speak about their work and why nurses are well suited to tackle environmental challenges.

Farmer, nurse, researcher, connector.

Lindsley—or “Farmer Matt,” as colleagues know him—is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of […]

2024-04-02T09:27:43-04:00April 2nd, 2024|environmental health, Nursing|0 Comments
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A Pediatric ICU Nurse Finds Relief in Not Compartmentalizing Hard Emotions Like Grief

Editor’s note: Hui-wen Sato is a pediatric ICU nurse in California and a regular writer for this blog who has gone deeply into the topic of grief, her own and that of patients and their families. Her insights reverse our usual ways of understanding grief, finding a generative energy instead of a wasteland. Here is a key passage from a TED-style talk (see video below) she gave at the last End Well Project conference in November 2023. End Well is “a nonprofit on a mission to transform how the world thinks about, talks about, and plans for the end of life.”

“And so I realized that what I was going to need to learn how to do was not compartmentalize, but integrate all of my experiences into all of who I am. And as I started to learn how to integrate all of my experiences, there came a curious relief and freedom with this integration. Because I no longer had to pretend that I didn’t grieve for my patients. I could just grieve. And I could then get in closer and actually learn more about who they were, who their families were, and I could start to provide a kind of care I think I perhaps had always wanted to provide, but perhaps was a little too scared to get close enough to learn how.”

2024-03-28T14:03:14-04:00March 28th, 2024|end of life, Nursing, pediatrics|0 Comments
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Improving Patient Throughput: Recommended Reading in AJN’s April Issue

The April issue of AJN is now live.

How can an acuity-adaptable model improve patient throughput and care? This month’s Original Research article, “Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Acuity Adaptability in Noncritical Trauma Care,” evaluates the implementation of such a model on a 20-bed noncritical trauma unit, examining the pre- and postimplementation metrics for throughput efficiency, resource utilization, and nursing quality indicators. (CE credit available)

Read “The Occupational and Environmental Hazards of Uncovered Toilets” to learn about the potential exposure risks associated with toilet plume aerosols—and how nurses can address these risks.

Crowdsourced registries have been used to quickly gather information, especially during emerging public health concerns. In “Developing Crowdsourced Clinical Registry Studies,” the authors describe the process of planning, developing, executing, and evaluating the crowdsourced COVID-19 and Invasive Cryptococcal Disease Registry, and highlight the use of a project management approach to successfully implement the resulting study. […]

2024-03-28T11:11:15-04:00March 25th, 2024|Nursing|0 Comments
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Involving Nurses in Hospital Staffing Decision-Making

A qualitative study that looks at the experiences of nurses who have served on staffing committees.

When I am faced with challenging situations and issues that involve multiple stakeholders, I seek guidance or information from others to make the most informed decisions. This is a practice many health professionals and researchers emulate, and it makes sense to do this, yet when it comes to the topic of nurse staffing in hospital settings, nurses are not usually involved in the process. If they are involved to some degree, it is likely because of a hospital’s pursuit for nursing excellence recognition through shared governance and/or the external pressure of state laws, like mandated nurse staffing committees.

Nurse autonomy and engagement means better care.

Over the years, research has shown how increases in nurse autonomy and engagement can positively benefit patient care and support nurse retention, yet how do these concepts apply to nurse staffing? In what ways are those concepts translated into practice or policy efforts? These were the questions that initially guided me.

Seeking a real voice in nurse staffing policymaking.

In a survey exploring the concept of staff nurse involvement in hospital staffing policymaking, most nurses described feeling powerless. with little […]

2024-03-20T10:15:39-04:00March 20th, 2024|nurse staffing, Nursing, nursing research, patient safety|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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