October Issue Highlights: Data on RN Suicides, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Starting a Research Project, More

“As a nurse, I believe in science as a guide for our actions….As a human being with morals, empathy, and compassion, I believe there are lines no person, certainly no government leader, should cross.”—editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her editorial, “No Time for Silence”

The October issue of AJN is now live. Here are some highlights.

Original Research: Suicide Among RNs: An Analysis of 2015 Data from the National Violent Death Reporting System

The authors of this study sought to determine the number of suicides and estimated rate of suicide among RNs. Their findings indicate that RNs may die by suicide at higher rates than the total employed population in the 16-to-64-year age range.

From the CDC: Understanding Autism Spectrum Disorder

An evidence-based review of the risk factors for autism spectrum disorder, its epidemiology, common concurrent conditions, evaluation, diagnosis, treatments, and outcomes.

New Series: Nursing Research, Step by Step: How Does Research Start?

This article—the first in a new series on clinical research by nurses—focuses on how to start the research process by identifying a topic of interest and developing a well-defined research question.

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2020-09-28T08:47:02-04:00September 28th, 2020|Nursing|1 Comment
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A Nursing Perspective on Addressing Racism and Health Inequities

Editor’s note: We’ve all witnessed the recent public outcry against instances of racist behavior and brutality. As nurses, we also witness the toll racism takes on health as well as the racial inequities in access to care and within health care institutions. In the below blog post, AJN senior editor Corinne McSpedon excerpts her recent conversation about these topics with Monica McLemore. I also encourage you to listen to the recent webinar, Nursing’s Role in Addressing Racism, in which a panel of nurses address structural racism, how it prevents health equity, and what actions one can take to change or influence change. You can earn one contact hour of CNE credit.—Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Confronting racism during the pandemic.

Over the summer, I spoke with Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, to discuss antiracism efforts amid the COVID-19 crisis and the nationwide demonstrations against police brutality. McLemore is an associate professor in the Department of Family Health Care Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is also affiliated with the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. She previously worked for nearly three decades as a public health and staff nurse.

Below are highlights of this discussion. The full article, A Conversation with Monica R. McLemore, is […]

2020-09-24T08:55:03-04:00September 24th, 2020|Nursing|0 Comments
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Frontline Nurses Speak Out – A Health Care Crisis That ‘Didn’t Have to Be This Way’

Themes of heartbreak, heroics, exhaustion, sadness, and anger.

Previously on this blog, I posted about the Frontline Nurses WikiWisdom Forum, an initiative AJN joined back in March to bring forth the experiences and thoughts of nurses working at the point of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with Cynda Rushton (Johns Hopkins School of Nursing & Berman Institute of Bioethics and AJN editorial board member) and Theresa Brown (nurse, author, and AJN contributing editor) and the folks at New Voice Strategies, we solicited stories from nurses from around the country. Of the many who visited the site, 463 nurses joined and shared their experiences.

Forum moderator Cindy Richards, a professional journalist, worked with four “thought leaders” from the nurses to organize the themes and recommendations from the rich content posted by the nurses.

And while we recognize that the pandemic is far from over (United States cases as of September 20 were over 6.7 million, approaching 200,000 deaths and still on the rise), we felt we had reached a critical mass of content. The stories echoed repetitive themes of heartbreak, heroics, exhaustion, sadness, and anger.

“Nurses often put their patients’ needs before their own. That didn’t change during the pandemic. What did change is that nurses saw the level […]

2020-09-22T09:47:24-04:00September 22nd, 2020|COVID-19, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective, Public health|0 Comments
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How Do You Feel When Your Patients Can’t Afford Care?

“Every day in the United States, nurses watch patients forgo beneficial treatment they cannot afford despite nursing’s moral standard to treat patients without regard to financial condition.”

How often have you been left, pretty much on your own, to figure out a way that your uninsured and/or homeless patients have access to something (anything!) that will maintain their health when you aren’t with them? Are there meds they can’t pay for? Do they need prenatal care that they can’t afford? Can they possibly function without home care of some kind?

Moral distress as a call to seek systemic change.

In “Ethical Issues: The Moral Distress of Nurses When Patients Forgo Treatment Because of Cost” in this month’s AJN (free to access until October 7), Douglas Olsen and Linda Keilman discuss the moral distress of nurses when we are unable to meet the needs of patients who don’t have the money to pay for care in our for-profit health care system. […]

2020-09-17T07:03:34-04:00September 17th, 2020|health care policy, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient experience, Patients, Public health|0 Comments
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‘Didn’t You Used to Be a Nurse?’: Finding the Nurse Within

The author of the Reflections essay in AJN‘s September issue, Kathleen Resnick, confronts a question many nurses must confront at some point: what is it to be a nurse?

And a related question: what is the essence of nursing work? If you can no longer work as a nurse because of physical constraints or for another reason, are you still a nurse?

Writes Resnick in “A Different Kind of Nurse“:

My nursing career was spent in hospitals, working mostly in critical care as a bedside nurse, then in management. I worked hard and my work was a large part of my sense of self-worth. I loved patient care and the satisfaction of making a difference. As a manager, I felt my  primary mission was to enable those I served to do their best work. . . . I was somebody. Now what am I? An acquaintance asked me, “Didn’t you used to be a nurse?”

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2020-09-15T16:23:15-04:00September 15th, 2020|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing stories|2 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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