Web Roundup: Changing Specialties, Measuring Quality, Caring and Freeloading, More

by Ramon Peco/via Flickr

Here are a few things worth noting on the Web today. At Code Blog, “Rookie Mistake” is illuminating on the subject of switching nursing specialties. Here’s a short excerpt:

My new hospice job is going pretty well.  I really like it.  It’s been an adjustment, but worth the stress of change.

Overall, I’ve been pretty surprised at how little I know/knew about how people die naturally.

In ICU, if you are actively dying, you look terrible.  In most cases, people dying in the ICU are there because we were or are trying to save their life.  This requires some treatments that cause other problems. . . . That is what dying looked like to me for 14 years.  Turns out it’s a pretty exaggerated version of how it is when people naturally die without life-saving interventions.

Also notable: a short post that many may relate to about paperwork and burnout, at The Nurse Practitioner’s Place.

In other news, Kaiser Health News reports that the Joint Commission is releasing its annual list of hospitals that have done well in following certain crucial procedures and protocols:

The commission is recognizing 620 hospitals (download list as PDF or .xls file) – 18 percent of those it accredits — as “top performers” for following recommended protocols at least 95 percent of the time.

Congrats to those who made the list. But a caveat: The article does […]

2016-11-21T13:09:14-05:00September 19th, 2012|Nursing|1 Comment

Talking About Death: Not Nice, But Necessary

Photo by Eliza Peyton, via Flickr

By Amy M. Collins, editor

Our recent blog post on “death panels” triggered a memory of my own first real experience with the death of a loved one. It was a little over 10 years ago. I was living overseas when my mother called to tell me my grandfather had liver cancer and had been given maybe a year to live.

The physician had given my family three choices: the aggressive choice, chemo; a less aggressive treatment with an experimental drug that had moderate success; or to let him live out the rest of his numbered days. We chose the middle ground.

At the time I worked in medical publishing and thought I knew everything. Over the weeks that followed I would call home to get progress reports, usually putting my two cents in about what my family should be asking the physician. Finally, when things seemed to be getting worse, I flew home to help.

Nothing could have prepared me for the emaciated man I found sitting up in bed when I went to my grandparents’ house to visit. I hardly recognized my grandfather. It hadn’t been that long, but the cancer had already ravaged him. Despite this, he was cheerful and had high hopes. He didn’t […]

The Case of Amanda Trujillo

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Post updated on January 10, 2013; see final paragraph. Amanda Trujillo, MSN, RN, is a nurse who until recently worked at Banner Del Webb Hospital in Sun City, Arizona, until she was fired for, as she claims, just doing what she’s obligated to do as a nurse—specifically, providing a patient information about a surgical procedure in an attempt to support fully informed decision making. (You can read her e-mail detailing her story here. She did not, as she has pointed out in comments, ever attempt to directly obtain informed consent herself.)

Amanda Trujillo

Ms. Trujillo says that, when the patient had a change of heart about the surgery, she requested a hospice consult. After a physician complained that Trujillo had overstepped her scope of practice, the hospital filed a complaint with the Arizona Board of Nursing, which has launched an investigation.

Ms. Trujillo has gone public with her story, sending e-mails and tweets to editors, public officials, bloggers, and the news media. The nursing blogosphere is full of posts with her story—Emergiblog, vdutton’s posterous (which has her attorney’s response to the complaint), and thenerdynurse, as well as a number of others. On January 31, she was interviewed on local television. She makes a […]

Maybe Palliative Care SHOULD Go to the Dogs

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Last week, we took Sam, our ailing 14-year-old Labrador Retriever, on what became his last trip to the vet. Sam had been diagnosed with bone cancer in February after we noticed the right half of his head enlarging. Because of where the tumor was, it was inoperable. We felt that at his age chemotherapy wasn’t a realistic option, and we didn’t want the last few months of his life to be bad ones.

His veterinarian, who’d treated Sam since his puppy days, supported the decision, saying she would make the same choice for her dog. And so we spent the last few months adjusting doses of steroids and pain meds to enable him to live as normally as possible. For Sam, “normal” was being able to greet all comers to our door, to be the leader on his walks, to be smack in the middle of where his family was. (If people were in the basement and on the second floor, he would lie equidistant from where everyone in the house was. If we were in the same room, he sat, front legs crossed in his “elegant dog” pose, where he could see us all.)

So last month, when we saw that he would no longer get up to greet visitors or his family; was reluctant to go on walks (he did, but with a great sigh and lots of panting after even the shortest […]

2016-11-21T13:15:45-05:00September 13th, 2010|Nursing|6 Comments
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