Has the Future of Nursing Report Made a Difference?

Action Coalition logoBy Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I went to Washington, DC, for a meeting convened to hear whether implementation of recommendations from the Institute of Medicine’s (now renamed the National Academy of Medicine, NAM) 2010 report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, had indeed made a difference for nurses and the nursing profession.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which sponsored the report, had also provided support to AARP’s Center to Champion Nursing in America to coordinate a “campaign for action” and manage the work of 51 state action coalitions. Five years later, RWJF asked the National Academy of Medicine to review and report on its progress.

In brief, the evaluation committee said that things were improving for nursing and that nursing needs to focus on three major themes:

  • communicating and collaborating with groups beyond nursing
  • improving diversity
  • getting better data

[…]

2016-11-21T13:01:39-05:00December 17th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|5 Comments
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Recent End-of-Life Care Links of Note, by Nurses and Others

nature's own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons nature’s own tightrope/marie and alistair knock/flickr creative commons

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

End-of-life care and decision making have been getting a lot of attention lately. The Institute of Medicine released a new report earlier this year, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (available for free download as a PDF).

Nurses who write often write about end-of-life matters. A couple of recent examples:

On the Nurse Manifest Web site, a look at the realities and challenges of futile care in America. Here’s a quote:

“I am currently teaching a thanatology (study of death and dying) course for nurses that I designed . . . to support students to go deeply in their reflective process around death and dying, to explore the holistic needs of the dying, and to delve into the body of evidence around the science and politics of death and dying.”

Or read another nurse blogger’s less abstract take on the tricky emotional territory nurses face when a patient dies.

Elsewhere on the Web
Vox reporter Sarah Kliff collects five strong end-of-life essays that recently appeared in various sources.

And here’s something very practical that might catch on: according to a recent […]

2016-11-21T13:02:42-05:00April 13th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement|0 Comments
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Angelina, Florence, End-of-Life Care, Nursing History, Postpartum Depression: A Web Roundup

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

In the news today we have an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Angelina Jolie about her rationale for getting a double mastectomy. There are sure to be many reactions to this disclosure, with many offering praise for her frankness about her decision. There may also be some who disagree with her decision to take this preventive step because she has the BRCA1 gene, which sharply increases her risk of getting breast cancer. Jolie’s perspective seems to be one of empowerment for women rather than a sense of helplessness or sorrow. Though Jolie’s circumstances are hardly universal in terms of the cushion provided by her great wealth, it’s hard not to admire the strength it takes to see things in such a positive light: “Life comes with many challenges,” she writes. “The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.”

MarchCoverIt’s come to our attention that, in honor of Nurses Week, the American Antiquarian Society blog, PastIsPresent.org, put together an interesting collection of items related to nursing from its mid-19th century archives, leading their post with a mention of AJN‘s March cover, which featured a vintage illustration, “A Map of the Open Country of  Woman’s Heart.”

A recent post we ran about the fading away of certain nursing blogs gets a mention from PixelRN, who has […]

2016-11-21T13:07:36-05:00May 14th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Best Care at Lower Cost: New IOM Report Spotlights Crucial Role of Nurses

By Mary D. Naylor, PhD, FAAN, RN. Dr. Naylor is the Marian S. Ware Professor in Gerontology and director of the NewCourtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is also the National Program Director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program, Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, aimed at generating, disseminating, and translating research to understand how nurses contribute to quality patient care. She was appointed to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission in 2010. 

Building on the Future of Nursing report’s call for nurses to fully engage with fellow health care professionals, a new report from the Institute of Medicine, Best Care at Lower Cost, calls on nurses and others in the health care system to apply emerging tools, technologies, and approaches to yield lower costs and better health outcomes. I had the great fortune to serve as a member of the study committee.

The complexity problem. The report couldn’t be more timely or relevant, particularly for nurses and the patients they serve, given the complexity of the current health care system. Administrative and workflow inefficiencies limit hospital nurses from spending more than about 30% of their time on direct patient care. With increasing specialization, modern medicine now includes nurses in more than 50 specialties. To successfully coordinate a patient’s care, nurses need to communicate and collaborate with patients, family caregivers, physicians, pharmacists, social workers, and many other team members.

The complexity […]

2016-11-21T13:09:23-05:00September 6th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Vampire Nurses, PhDs, Your Best Moment as a Nurse: Today’s Notes from the Nursosphere

Here are some recent posts of interest we noticed on the nursing blogs. Many of these blogs can actually be found on our blogroll, so we hope you’re exploring what’s there from time to time, even if we know the list isn’t exhaustive and is probably missing some other excellent (and at least somewhat frequently updated) blogs.

It’s good to know that Will, the nurse/comic artist who shares his drawings at Drawing on Experience, has started posting again more regularly. One of his most recent efforts depicts a night shift nurse as a kind of vampire. It’s funny and, in a way, insightful. We give just a thumbnail version of it below on the right, in the interests of preserving the artist’s copyright; to see it enlarged, click the image and visit the version posted on his site, where you can also find a bunch more drawings, many about his life as a relatively new nurse. 

The INQRI Blog (that INQRI stands for Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a real mouthful) has a new post about an increase in enrollment in nursing doctorate programs. Here’s an excerpt:

According to new data released recently by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), enrollment in doctoral nursing programs increased significantly in 2010. The AACN believes that this shows a strong interest in both research-focused and practice-focused doctorates.

The post also connects […]

2016-11-21T13:13:39-05:00March 30th, 2011|career, students|1 Comment
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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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