By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
August is one of my favorite months. Many people take time off, so the commute into AJN‘s Manhattan office is fairly easy. People’s pace seems to be a little bit slower; there seems to be less immediacy around responses to email. It’s a good time to catch up on reading manuscripts and other work I’ve had piled up.
If you’ve gone through your beach reading, here are a few useful collections on perennially important topics from our back pages:
If you’re just getting started in a nursing career, you might want to read a three-part series of articles, “Protecting Your License,” written by AJN contributing editor Edie Brous, who is a nurse and an attorney and writes on legal matters for the journal. Her series describes common myths about licensure and what steps to take to protect yourself if you are sued or brought up on charges by your state board of nursing.
If you work with older adults, you can refresh assessment skills with our “How To Try This” series of 30 articles and videos describing evidence-based geriatric assessment tools and best practices. The series was developed in partnership with the New York University College of Nursing’s Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing, with funding by the John A. Hartford Foundation. There’s also another series, “A New Look at the Old,” developed in 2004–2005 with funding from Atlantic Philanthropies, that focuses on evidence-based care of older adults. It’s still very much worth reading (or watching, in the case of the short videos).
Hospital-based nurses should find our series on supporting family caregivers helpful. Nurses are hard-pressed to help family caregivers be prepared to assume care responsibilities when loved ones are discharged. This series of articles and videos builds on our 2008 state-of-the-science project examining family caregivers needs, which was developed with funding from the John A. Hartford Foundation and the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation.
And given the current Ebola crisis in West Africa, you might want to check out our recent blog post that cuts through the media hype about Ebola and provides a fact-based summary that will help you answer patients’ questions.
If you want a good book, grab Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse, the story of Charles Cullen, a nurse who might be one of the most prolific serial killers in history. It chronicles how hospitals just let him leave and move on to another institution when suspicions arose, rather than investigate allegations. He was finally arrested after 14 years, as covered in this AJN news story from 2004.
So much to read, so little time…
I’ll be checking out the evidence-based geriatric work myself. How about you? Reading is a limited chore. Ignorance is an unending nightmare, until you address it. Will you, or not?