Treating Kids With Asthma in the ED Means More Than Just Putting Out Fires

EDs play an important role in the care of children with asthma. ED clinicians often treat families who don’t have a consistent relationship with a primary care provider. Given this opportunity, it’s essential that all members of the pediatric ED health care team be informed, educated, and updated on the latest asthma treatment guidelines to ensure best practice and high quality outcomes.

In this month’s Emergency column, “Managing Pediatric Asthma Exacerbations in the ED” (which will be free for the next six months), three nurses at Children’s Hospital Boston present a composite case, review the evidence regarding treatment options, describe practices at their own hospital and asthma treatment guidelines, and emphasize the crucial importance ED nurses can play in making sure these children don’t end up back in the ED because of lack of follow-up care or poor care in the home.

Have a look and let us know what you’re doing to make sure you’re not just putting out fires when you treat a child with asthma in the ED.—JM, senior editor

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2016-11-21T13:14:02-05:00February 15th, 2011|Nursing|1 Comment
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Requiem for New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital

A community in mourning leaves its messages

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editorial director/interim editor-in-chief 

Each day, Alison Bulman walks by the closed doors of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village on her way to work as the senior editorial coordinator at the American Journal of Nursing. She has watched the number of testimonies left on the doors boarded up in April grow, as former patients leave messages of gratitude, anger, and sorrow for the loss of this 160-year-old institution.  Alison thought they were worth sharing, and we agreed. So she took a great series of photos, which we’ve now collected in AJN‘s Flickr stream.  

My first news story for AJN was about four nurses who worked at St.Vincent’s and who died while vacationing together. And in AJN’s first issue after September 11, 2001, we wrote about St.Vincent’s major role in treating victims and first responders after the attacks on the World Trade Center. 

As a New Yorker and a nurse, I share the sense of loss felt for this venerable institution—not as much for its past as for the loss of a major health care center in a community that depended on it for access to care. The closing of the emergency department has already had repercussions: the Wall Street Journal reported on June 17 that ER visits in the surrounding hospitals were up. And midwives who practiced at St. Vincent’s were left in the lurch without physician back-up agreements […]

2016-11-21T13:16:54-05:00July 6th, 2010|Nursing|8 Comments
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Have ‘Mercy’! One Nurse’s Take on the Latest Nurse Drama

MercyScreenshotBy Peggy McDaniel, BSN, RN

As a long-time fan of ER and Grey’s Anatomy, I looked forward to watching the first episode of Mercy, an NBC drama that focuses on three nurses instead of using doctors as the primary characters (click the image to visit the show’s Website, where you can check out the first episode). At the same time, while I’ve often laughed aloud at the tasks doctors are seen doing on Grey’s Anatomy, such as putting patients through a CT scan, it’s the characters that make the show compelling—and as a clinician, I choose to enjoy them and ignore that you rarely see a nurse at the bedside.

ER, unlike Grey’s Anatomy, featured what I would consider “real” nurses doing “real” nursing tasks backed by intelligence, education, and intuition. Maybe it made a difference that it was originally created by Michael Crichton, a doctor who obviously knew something about what happens in a clinical setting. ER skillfully blended clinical action and personal stories of strong, engaging characters. As a clinician, I loved the accuracy and drama.

I have mixed feelings about Mercy. The first episode introduced the characters, who appeared to be at least interesting, if not scintillating. Veronica, the primary character, suffers from PTSD after her return from service in Iraq. While she […]

2016-11-21T13:22:09-05:00September 25th, 2009|career, nursing perspective|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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