May Issue: Addressing Nurse Burnout, New Chest Pain Assessment Guidelines, More

“This is the third Nurses Day celebrated since the start of the pandemic and nurses’ work has gotten more recognition than ever. But is that recognition enough?”—AJN senior clinical editor Christine Moffa in her editorial, “Honoring Nurses Where They Need It”

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

Original Research: Combating the Opioid Epidemic Through Nurse Use of Multimodal Analgesia: An Integrative Literature Review

This review presents strong evidence on the benefits of multimodal analgesia in reducing opioid use for pain management in the acute care setting.

CE: Chemicals in the Home That Can Exacerbate Asthma

The authors describe how the use of cleaning and disinfectant products may affect asthma and asthma-related symptoms and report the findings of a recent study they conducted that identified how these products could reduce asthma control in older adults.

Effective Holistic Approaches to Reducing Nurse Stress and Burnout During COVID-19

This quality improvement project evaluated the use of serenity lounges—dedicated rooms where nurses can take workday breaks to relax and rejuvenate—and massage chairs on nurses’ anxiety, stress, and burnout.

[…]

2022-04-25T09:32:36-04:00April 25th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Taking Stock of the Nursing Profession as the Pandemic Weakens Its Hold

Projected nursing shortages by 2026, by state. Click image to expand.

Exhaustion and burnout. Insufficient workplace protections. The growth of contract nursing. A lack of minimum staffing ratios.

These and other issues have been important nursing topics since long before the pandemic. But as the essential work of nurses has come under a brighter spotlight during the COVID crisis, headlines and news stories have been increasingly highlighting these important topics, providing wider recognition of nurses’ experiences and concerns.

In just the past week, a sampling of headlines from across the country show how nursing workforce issues are taking center stage, from insufficient workplace protections in California to state legislatures considering capping travel nurses’ pay in Missouri to workforce shortages in Pennsylvania to unsafe working conditions in Maine.

Liz Seegert explores where the profession stands as the country enters the third year of the COVID pandemic in the February AJN Reports, “The Current State of Nursing.” She notes the results of recent surveys, including one by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses that looked at how the pandemic has affected nursing.

“Exhaustion, frustration, anger, burnout, depression, and fear for their own and their […]

2022-03-07T09:52:15-05:00March 7th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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If Nurses Are War Heroes, They Deserve Real and Lasting Support

Matthew Waring/Unsplash

The rhetoric of war is regularly applied to health care, whether we’re talking about a patient “fighting” cancer or “frontline” workers like nurses engaged in a “battle” or a “war” against a new infectious disease. This is a habit beloved of speech makers, academics, and journalists, and it’s likely to continue.

With strong metaphors comers real responsibility.

Rather than decrying this practice in favor of a more purely accurate use of language, the author of this month’s Viewpoint, Lorri Birkholz, DNP, RN, NE-BC, an assistant professor of nursing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, argues that the choice to use such language comes with responsibility.

“If war language is going to be used to define this pandemic and the nurses caring for patients, then legislation must ensure care for their acute and long-term physical and mental well-being.”

Birkholz notes that federal COVID-relief legislation limited provisions for frontline workers to temporary hazard pay and mandated sick leave—far short, by way of comparison, of that received by 9/11 first responders or returning war veterans. […]

2022-01-24T09:56:24-05:00January 24th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Acute Care Nurses: An Endangered Species?

Our acute care settings are in crisis—staff are physically and emotionally exhausted. And many have decided they can’t take it anymore.

“At the virtual conference of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) in July, researcher Peter Buerhaus reported preliminary findings of his study on the impact of the pandemic on the nursing workforce. He reported that a phone survey of over 800 AONL members conducted in May revealed that more than 50% of hospital chief nurse officers were seeing “increased retirements, sick leave, and early exits, including among younger nurses.”— AJN Editorial, September 2021

It’s been no secret that the hospital work environment has been problematic for nurses and patients alike—we know stressed and worn-out clinicians make more errors, and patient care suffers. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine released Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses, which discussed workplace staffing and processes as intrinsic to ensuring patient safety. More recently, the National Academy of Medicine published Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being (2019), which noted, “The job demands placed on clinicians are often greater than the job resources available to them; this imbalance can lead to burnout.”

2021-09-10T08:59:51-04:00September 9th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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School Nurses During COVID-19: Still Holding the Line

Anything but the normal school year we’d hoped for.

The 2021-2022 school year is upon us and it is anything but the normal year many of us had hoped for. For some kids, it will be the first time going back into the classroom after 18 months at home. As a mom of two kids under 12 who cannot yet be vaccinated, it is a time of anxiety as I send my kids into school with a more contagious COVID-19 variant. Despite the mitigation efforts put in place, I wonder if it will be enough.

In parts of the country, cases are still skyrocketing and hundreds of kids have already had to quarantine or switch to remote learning. Some states have layers of mitigation in place in their schools, while in others, governors are fighting to keep schools from instituting mask mandates. And through this all, the person at the front line is the school nurse.

School nurses on the front lines as the rules keep changing.

In our August issue, AJN Reports highlights how school nursing has changed amid the current pandemic. Adding to the many other challenging tasks that school nurses already have is

2021-08-23T09:23:14-04:00August 23rd, 2021|COVID-19, school nurses|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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