Nurse Helps Prepare Police for Encounters with the Mentally Ill

Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, with Captain Dan Cahill (left) and Chief Robert H. Gustafson at the Orange County Police Department in Orange California. Photo courtesy of the Orange Police Department. Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, with Captain Dan Cahill (left) and Chief Robert H. Gustafson at the Orange County Police Department in Orange, California. Photo courtesy of the Orange Police Department.

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Nurses—especially those in the ED—often interact with law enforcement in the course of their work. However, few go outside of their setting to get involved in the training of police officers. But that’s exactly what one mental health nurse, Jeannine Loucks, MSN, RN-BC, PMH, did when she noticed that state hospitals were releasing patients with mental illness into the community and felt officers needed more tools in their arsenal in order to handle their potential encounters with these people.

“Officers today have a difficult job managing crime fighting, community relations, and safety,” Loucks said. “They’re also expected to be mediators and therapists.” She wanted to help both the officers and the patients, and so developed a training program not only for the local police, but eventually for people who worked security throughout her city of Orange, California. What started off as a local community initiative eventually grew, and through the use of training videos the program is now being used by police departments throughout her state and is also available by request to departments across the country.

In […]

2016-11-21T13:01:26-05:00February 22nd, 2016|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2014

safety Photo © One Way Stock.

For the past few years, we’ve highlighted the ECRI Institute’s annual Top 10 Health Technology Hazards report, which provides an overview of new and old technology hazards for health care facilities to keep in mind (read this year’s post here).

Now ECRI has released a new report entitled “Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations.” The goal of the list, according to ECRI, is to “give healthcare organizations a gauge to check their track record in patient safety.” The list, which will be published on an annual basis, draws upon more than 300,000 patient safety events, custom research requests, and root-cause analyses submitted to the institute’s federally designated patient safety organization (PSO) for assessment. A selection from the top 10 can be found below.

Poor care coordination with a patient’s next level of care

The concern: Gaps in communication about patient care—for example, between hospital and provider, among providers, and between long-term care settings and hospitals—have been reported to ECRI’s PSO. And while it is best practice for hospitals to send a patient’s discharge information to all of a patient’s providers, this doesn’t always happen.

Some suggestions: On reason information doesn’t get passed on, according to the report, is that staff […]

2016-11-21T13:04:28-05:00June 20th, 2014|Nursing|1 Comment
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Preventing the Next Elliot Rodger: A Call to Push for Solutions, Despite the Obstacles

Donna Sabella, PhD, MSN, PMHNP-BC, is a mental health nurse and assistant clinical professor and director of global studies at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions in Philadelphia. She also coordinates the AJN column Mental Health Matters.

screen capture Elliot RodgerWho’s next? On May 23rd, we were once again forced to witness a scene of senseless violence. Elliot Rodger  stabbed to death three men in his apartment, after which he gunned down two women and a man. Aside from the six murders, he injured 13 people, shooting some of them and hitting others with his car, before apparently shooting himself in his car.

All of this carnage from one lonely, angry, troubled 22-year-old raised in a world of relative privilege—we feel for the victims and their families, and we feel for the Rodger family as well, who appear to have done everything they could to help their son find help for his mental instability and prevent this latest tragedy from unfolding.

While perhaps comforting to family and friends of the slain, our grief and prayers for all involved and our dismay at the other horrific events preceding this one mean little when it comes to preventing the attacks of the next Elliot Rodger.

But I believe we are wrong if we think our outrage and sadness are all we […]

2016-11-21T13:04:33-05:00June 6th, 2014|nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Taking Postpartum Mood Disorders Seriously

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

Durer, Melancolia/Wikimedia Commons Durer, Melancolia/Wikimedia Commons

Last week, you probably heard that a 34-year-old mother was shot and killed by police after a car chase that ended with her trying to ram her car through White House barriers, her infant child still strapped in a car seat in the back.

Miriam Carey’s mother told reporters that her daughter was suffering from postpartum depression, though a number of commentators have pointed out that the extremity of her apparent delusions and the violence of her behavior suggest the more severe condition called postpartum psychosis (especially if it turns out that her condition was not chronic but instead began after she’d given birth).

Some estimates of the rate of major or minor depression in new mothers are as high as nearly 20%. AJN published a feature article (free until November 8) on this topic several years ago. The article describes postpartum depression and several related conditions (postpartum psychosis, panic attacks, PTSD, etc.) and discusses prevalence, risk factors, symptoms, diagnosis, interventions, and the potential long-term effects on children.

Postpartum depression can be powerful and hard to face, as it comes at a time that often combines social isolation with the […]

2016-11-21T13:06:22-05:00October 9th, 2013|nursing perspective|1 Comment
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The Grief Train

Then came “the Morning.” There was coffee, the newspaper, and ironed shirts. I was getting ready for a student’s dissertation defense and Paul, my husband, faced his own challenging day. As I prepared to shower, a crash sounded beyond the bedroom door. Something about the silence that followed made me grab my robe and go running.

GriefTrainIllustrationThat’s a teaser paragraph from AJN‘s October Reflections essay, “The Grief Train,”  by nurse, professor, and award-winning author Cheryl Dellasega. She writes about teaching a course called Death and Dying, and then having to try to make sense of a sudden, terrible loss in her own life. Like many profound American stories, this one ends in a long train trip.

I edit this column every month, and some of the stories go right to the heart of life, love, death, health, illness, healing, human connection and disconnection. The essay is free, so please click on the link above and read the whole thing. It’s well worth five minutes of your time.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

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2016-11-21T13:06:25-05:00October 3rd, 2013|nursing perspective|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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