Realizations of a New Nurse #1: I Am Now the Educator

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By Kinsey Morgan, RN. Kinsey is a new nurse who lives in Texas and currently works in the ICU in which she formerly spent three years as a CNA.

In nursing school, there is a growing push to educate future nurses on the amazing breadth of roles within the nursing profession. As a student, you are in some way exposed to the role of nurse as leader, advocate, healer, educator, team player, and researcher. Even this list is not exhaustive. These roles are certainly vital and important and worth teaching about in school.

As a brand new nurse, I haven’t personally encountered all of these roles yet, but there is one in particular that I encounter—and embody—every day: that of educator.

One of the most humbling realizations I’ve had since recently becoming a nurse is that I am now the educator. I’m glad to know that there are other nurses around me, as well as many resources from which to glean knowledge, but I am daily faced with the fact that people now look to me for answers. There are times when I feel outside myself, for while I give correct answers, hearing myself giving them is a little surreal. I’m sure these feelings subside with time, but I hope that I always remain somewhat in awe of the amount of trust my title elicits.

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2016-11-21T13:11:31-05:00November 7th, 2011|career, nursing perspective, students|4 Comments
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Legacy of the Living Legends: Slackers Need Not Apply

By Shawn Kennedy, editor-in-chief

Earlier this month, I attended the American Academy of Nursing 38th Annual Meeting and Conference. With e-mails flooding my inbox and a full meeting agenda over the next few days, I was thinking of skipping the 2011 Living Legends event that took place on the first evening. Thankfully, an old friend, nurse historian Sandy Lewinson, talked me into going—it was one of the more memorable nursing events I’ve attended.

The academy honors “Living Legends” in recognition of the multiple contributions these nurses have made to the profession and the impact these contributions have made on health care in the United States and abroad. This year’s honorees are shown in the photo, from left: May L. Wykle, Meridean L. Maas, Ada Sue Hinshaw, Suzanne Lee Feetham, and Patricia E. Benner.

Credited with such achievements as creating a nursing taxonomy on nursing error, building the science of pediatric nursing in the context of the family, conducting ground-breaking nursing research, developing and implementing professional nurse governance in employing organizations, promoting policy change, and addressing the nursing shortage, these nurses join 77 other nursing notables who’ve been so honored since the first class was named in 1994. […]

2016-11-21T13:11:35-05:00October 27th, 2011|career, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Nurses and Patient-Centered Research

By Shawn Kennedy, editor-in-chief

I’m immersed in nursing research and nursing leaders this week, attending (in order and immediately following one another) meetings of the Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science (CANS), the 25th anniversary concluding scientific symposium of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), and finally, the American Academy of Nursing.

Wednesday was CANS and its focus on comparative effectiveness research. After an opening keynote by Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), who discussed the need to accelerate progress in improving U.S. health outcomes, a panel of nurses discussed different methodological considerations, from databases to competencies.

Research to help people make informed decisions. Especially interesting was a discussion of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the research entity which was mandated by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. […]

2016-11-21T13:11:45-05:00October 13th, 2011|nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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When Being Good Means Looking Bad: An Ethical Quandary for Nurses

Performance measurement, an increasingly pervasive trend in health care, is credited with significant improvements in the quality of care . . . . Even so, this is little comfort when a nurse faces a situation where an action necessary for meeting a performance measure isn’t what she or he believes is best for a particular patient. For example, falls are often tallied as a performance measure, but frail patients need to be walked; raising the head of the bed to prevent pneumonia is often counted in performance evaluation but may result in less turning of the patient, which may mean more sacral ulcers—which may or may not be tallied as a separate performance measure.

That’s from an article in this month’s AJN by nurse ethicist Doug Olsen. It’s called “When Being Good Means Looking Bad,” and is about potential unintended effects of some well-intentioned performance measures that don’t easily allow for consideration of clinical context. Olsen writes that the nurse may, in certain situations, find herself or himself faced with three highly imperfect options to choose between:

2016-04-18T15:03:34-04:00October 7th, 2011|career, Ethics, nursing perspective|5 Comments
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Blind Spot – At the Intersection of Mother and Nurse

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” was published in the May 2010 issue of AJN.

Being a nurse has changed my reactions to situations at home. For one thing, I don’t get overexcited about non-life-threatening medical problems. I can hardly stand the thought of going to an emergency room (Steri-Strips and ice are my usual “go-to” treatment plans). I’d like to blame this on working in a trauma center—it makes sense that seeing catastrophic injuries every day tends to make less severe injuries look insignificant—but I’m not sure that completely excuses my recent diagnostic error.

My son, who’s 12, came home from school last week complaining that his hand was sore. He’d hit a wall in gym, he said, but it was a padded wall, and he hadn’t hit it very hard. Still, he was absolutely certain that, at the very least, he’d dislocated something, and that, most likely, he’d broken his hand.

To my defense, he has a history of overdramatizing situations, and I took his self-assessment with a grain of salt. Although the side of his hand was slightly swollen, nothing was bruised, and everything seemed to be moving all right.

We iced it, of course, and although hand pain didn’t seem to interfere with his usual activities, he proceeded to tell anyone who would listen that he’d broken his hand.

“Stop saying that!” I told him. […]

2016-11-21T13:11:48-05:00October 6th, 2011|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|7 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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