Return on Investment: A Nurse’s Mother Makes Her Wishes Clear
By Margaret Gallagher, BSN, RN. Margaret is a cardiovascular nurse currently working in Georgia. This is her first post for this blog.
- Fly Away / jenny.nash712, via Flickr
My parents believed it was their obligation to educate their children. My sister and I both walked out with a college diploma and no debt. Susan went to a state university for her pharmacy degree, but I fell in love with a private nursing school. So my mother spent her inheritance on her own alma mater’s archrival because it was where I wanted to go. Mom got what she paid for, however, as I graduated with a BSN that has done more than just keep the roof over my head.
Shortly after I passed my boards, I planned a trip to visit my parents. I got report for my last shift, then walked in on a shouting match. My patient lay comatose between his two adult sons. Awareness of my presence brought a thick silence, followed by the younger son muttering an “excuse me” as he bulldozed his way out. After a pause, the remaining son searched my face as he began to speak.
“The doctors just told us today that Dad’s never going to get better than this. They asked us how far we […]
If the Patient Doesn’t Understand the Treatment: New Essay by Theresa Brown
Ben’s inability to understand even the basics of his situation, combined with his lack of family support, made it seem that we were in effect imprisoning him and torturing him.
That’s an excerpt from the Reflections essay in the June issue of AJN. By Theresa Brown, a nurse who regularly writes for the New York Times “Well” blog, “Right Treatment, Right Patient?” explores the ethics and emotions involved in providing an unpleasant but potentially life-saving treatment to a patient who can’t understand what’s being done to him (click through to the PDF for the best version).
We hope you’ll read it through and let us know if you’ve ever faced a similar ethical quandary as a health care professional (or, for that matter, as a family member or patient).—JM, senior editor
Bullying Wars: Theresa Brown vs. ‘the entire physician profession’
By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief
On May 11, an op-ed piece written by nurse and New York Times blogger Theresa Brown on bullying by physicians caused some physicians to protest (full disclosure: Brown’s honest and moving ethical meditation on a very different topic, “Right Treatment, Right Patient?”, was just published in our June issue).
Notable among her critics was Kevin Pho of the popular blog, Kevin MD, who wrote that Brown “unfairly blames doctors for hospital bullying.” He claimed that Brown uses her writing outlet to “metaphorically bully the entire physician profession.” Another commentary (by physician Ford Vox, writing in The Atlantic Monthly) accused Brown of publicly “drawing and quartering” her colleagues.
Spare me, please. Brown used a recent personal encounter to illustrate a problem that is, unfortunately, commonplace in hospitals. She used it as a lede and parlayed the story into an insightful piece about bullying in hospitals. (From experiences I had and witnessed during my clinical years, I actually thought it was a fairly mild example.) Ironically, the strong language used to counter Brown’s commentary made it seem that physicians were trying to bully Brown into silence because she’d spoken out. As if to say: how dare a nurse challenge physician behavior? […]
Into the Alabama Tornado Zone: First Dispatches from a Red Cross Volunteer
Last summer, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, wrote a series of posts for this blog as she spent her summer vacation retracing the steps of Florence Nightingale in England and Turkey. Now she’s gone to Alabama as a Red Cross volunteer in the wake of a series of devastating tornadoes. You can read Susan’s daily on-the-go entries here. The accounts from the first two days—of her family’s history with the Red Cross in other disasters, and of arriving and settling in to less-than-ideal sleeping arrangements—are below. New updates (some of it quite moving and disturbing) will soon follow, and all updates will be collected on a separate page for easy reference.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor
- Sue Hassmiller
Monday, May 2: Duty calls
I have been involved with the Red Cross for 36 years now, ever since the organization helped me find my parents when they were victims of an earthquake while vacationing in Mexico City. It was the day my parents made it home safely that I made a silent pledge to myself that I would find a way to repay my gratitude to this wonderful organization. As a young nurse, I signed up with the Red Cross in my college town of Tallahassee. I went on quite a few disasters in my single days, but these days, […]