ANA’s Cipriano, AARP’s Reinhard Comment on ACA’s Undoing

President Obama signing the ACA in 2010/via Wikimedia Commons

Nurses and the Undoing of the ACA

Many in the nursing community supported the Affordable Care Act (ACA) when it was first introduced. This is understandable, given our firsthand experience of patients who didn’t seek care until they were gravely ill because they lacked health insurance. We know how disease management can change outcomes for those with chronic illness and how preventive care can make the difference between having a treatable cancer or a metastasis.

In the years since, as both supporters and detractors continued to argue over the law and its need to be improved (or scrapped, depending on your viewpoint), over 20 million people gained health insurance and access to care.

Now as Congress moves to repeal and replace the ACA with a yet-to-be-determined plan, many are concerned that major gains will be lost and once again it will be the poor and vulnerable who will suffer. (I touched on some of the concerns in my March editorial.)

To get a little more insight, I spoke with two very policy-smart nurses about what might happen and what they feel should happen.

What ANA president Pam Cipriano said:

I asked ANA president Pam Cipriano what she thought was the most critical aspect of […]

2017-03-01T10:17:14-05:00March 1st, 2017|health care policy, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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No Longer Alone: Nurses Supporting Family Caregivers

By Susan C. Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior vice president and director, AARP Public Policy Institute, chief strategist, Center to Champion Nursing in America; Elaine Ryan, MPA, vice president of state advocacy and strategy integration, AARP government affairs; and Trish O’Keefe, PhD, RN, NE-BC, interim president, Morristown Medical Center, New Jersey

Teaching a daughter to help her mother with range-of-motion exercises. Teaching a daughter to help her mother with range-of-motion exercises

The public trusts nurses to care for them and to teach them how to care for themselves and for those they love. But a 2012 AARP/United Hospital Fund report funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care, shows there is a big disconnect. In this first nationally representative study of families providing complex care activities, almost half reported that they had provided medical/nursing treatments, including injections, wound care, administering multiple medications, managing colostomies, and giving tube feedings and nebulizer treatments—among many other tasks that nursing students find daunting when they are first learning how to do them.

Family caregivers are expected to step right in, with little to no instruction or support. Most (nearly 7 out of 10) of those they cared for did not get a home visit by a health care professional, despite multiple encounters […]

2016-11-21T13:01:47-05:00November 13th, 2015|Nursing, patient engagement, Patients, Public health|3 Comments
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Finding Future Leaders – and a NICHE in Nursing

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

It has been a hectic few weeks, as I’ve been traveling to the early spring nursing meetings (with still more to come).

With John Gransbach at NSNA meeting With John Gransbach at NSNA meeting

First I went to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend the National Student Nurses Association (NSNA) annual meeting (April 3–7). AJN has had a long association with the NSNA, supporting it in various ways since its 1952 founding, from hosting board meetings at AJN offices to producing the convention newsletter to convention scholarships for key contributors. In recent years, we’ve sponsored travel expenses to the annual meeting for the winner of Project InTouch, the member incentive plan. This year, the winner was John Gransbach, who graduated from the Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes-Jewish College in St Louis. He recruited 228 new NSNA members—an achievement certainly worth recognizing.

Future leaders. As I told the audience when I presented the plaque to Mr. Gransbach, this award isn’t just about growing membership in the NSNA—it’s about contributing to the future of the profession. Students who join the NSNA are already demonstrating a commitment to nursing by going beyond what’s required of them. They’ve joined an organization that provides considerable resources to help them begin their careers. Not only does it provide practical help with passing the NCLEX exam, writing a resume, and finding a job, but it informs them about what it means to be […]

2018-03-28T10:34:13-04:00April 15th, 2013|nursing perspective, students|0 Comments
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Amazing and Disheartening: How We Continue to Fail Family Caregivers

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Recently, as part of an ongoing collaborative initiative on supporting family caregivers with AARP (see the comprehensive, and free, AJN supplement called State of the Science: Professional Partners Supporting Family Caregivers), I listened to a group of family caregivers talk about what it’s like to care for sick parents and relatives at home. 

Most of the caregivers were in their 60s and retired, and now found themselves doing the back-breaking work of being on call 24/7, attending to everything from bathing and feeding to chauffeuring to health care appointments, paying the bills, and running the household—sometimes two households, if they lived apart from the person for whom they provided care.

It was amazing and disheartening to listen to them—amazing in terms of the lengths they went to make sure they were doing the right things, and disheartening because they were mostly on their own, with little support from the health care system. And this was right from the start; all said that information to prepare for the transition from hospital to home had been lacking. For the most part, families looked to the family physician to answer questions about what they would need to do at home—nurses were hardly mentioned.

What They Said

2016-11-21T13:14:40-05:00December 15th, 2010|nursing perspective|11 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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