A Nurses’ Week Visit with Theresa Brown

Nurse and author Theresa Brown Nurse and author Theresa Brown

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with nurse Theresa Brown (you can listen to our conversation here). Brown writes AJN’s quarterly What I’m Reading column. (This month, she writes about Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.)

Theresa Brown also blogs for the New York Times and is the author of The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, which I first wrote about when it was released last July. As I noted then, it’s probably the first book I’ve read that really captures certain elements of nurses’ work:

Anyone who wants to know what it’s like to be a nurse in a hospital today should read this book. Patients, families, and non-nurse colleagues tend to see nurses as ever-present yet often in the background, quietly moving from room to room, attending to patients, and distributing medications or charting at computers.

But what they don’t understand about what nurses do is what Brown so deftly describes—the cognitive multitasking and constant reordering of priorities that occur in the course of one shift as Brown manages the needs of four very different patients (she was working in a stem cell transplant unit at the time); completes admissions and discharges; and communicates […]

2016-11-21T13:01:14-05:00May 4th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories, patient experience|2 Comments
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A Found Poem For Nurses Week

Badruddeen, via Flickr Badruddeen, via Flickr

The poem below, originally published in our May 2005 issue, is by Veneta Masson, MA, RN. It’s a “found poem,” a form of poetry in which the poet assembles phrases selected from a source or sources. The lines here come “from actual posts to an Internet bulletin board,” but they could as easily be comments on AJN‘s Facebook page! The author is a nurse and writer living in Washington, DC (more about her work can be found here).—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

Nurses Week—What Did You Get?
Hi, everyone! Just curious to see what you received for Nurses Week.

Denim shirts with the company logo

Swiss Army–type knives with fourteen blades

Carnations in dollar-shop vases

One wilted rose

Soap on a rope

I think I’m worth more than this

A live band at the Holiday Inn

A potato bar luncheon

If you weren’t there, you got nada

Nothing

Not a thing

A PA announcement thanking the nurses

We dug out our caps & wore them all day
our VP of Nursing came to the unit and stayed for an hour
we sat with her & shared our stories of why we went into nursing

We got pizza one day (if you were there) and ice cream one day (if you were there)

Rolos, Skittles and M&Ms—give me the tools to do my […]

2016-11-21T13:02:32-05:00May 11th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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Nurses Week: An Annual Occasion for Mixed Feelings and a Little Reflection

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

by rosmary/via Flickr by rosmary/via Flickr

It’s here again, that week set aside to remember the accomplishments of Florence Nightingale and the good work all nurses do. Many nurses I speak with don’t like this annual event and feel it represents a patriarchal tradition that diminishes our professionalism. One nurse recently said to me, “Do they have a Neuroscientists Week, or an Attorneys Day?” (Actually, a Google search reveals there’s a “Be Kind to Lawyers Day”! But you get the point.)

Others say that Nurses Week provides an opportunity to promote our profession and gain recognition for what we do, even if only for a week—and that’s better than nothing. Organizations do seem to have evolved from the “Love a nurse prn” shoelaces to more substantial recognition, like a lunch with a noted speaker, or better yet, recognizing the achievements of their own staff.

On the other hand, I was surprised last year when I asked on AJN‘s Facebook page what nurses’ workplaces were doing for Nurses Week and many nurses replied, “nothing.” That word was often followed by some derogatory remarks about the facility.

I have mixed feelings, but I guess I fall more into the camp of using Nurses Week to remind everyone—including ourselves, colleagues, employers, and the public—of […]

2016-11-21T13:02:37-05:00May 4th, 2015|career, Ethics, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments
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May AJN: A-Fib and Epilepsy Updates, an Ethics Collection, Diversity, Resolving Conflict, More

AJN0515.Cover.2ndAJN’s May issue is now available on our Web site. And in honor of the upcoming Nurses Week, we are offering free access to the entire issue for the month of May. In addition, because the American Nurses Association has designated this the “Year of Ethics” and the theme of this year’s Nurses Week is “Ethical Practice, Quality Care,” we have also made available a collection of some of our top ethics articles from 1925 to the present. Here’s a selection of what else not to miss in our May issue.

Atrial fibrillation adversely affects the quality of life of millions of people, resulting in significant morbidity and mortality and health care costs. Our CE feature, “Atrial Fibrillation: Updated Management Guidelines and Nursing Implications,” reviews the recently updated guideline for the management of atrial fibrillation and stresses how nursing intervention in patient education and transition of care can improve outcomes. This feature offers 3 CE credits to those who take the test that follows the article.

Epilepsy is a serious neurologic disease that affects around 2.2 million people in the U.S. “Epilepsy Update, Part 1: Refining Our Understanding of a Complex Disease,” the first in a two-part CE series, discusses new research on the causes of epilepsy, new definitions that are changing the ways we evaluate the disease, and the psychosocial challenges […]

2016-11-21T13:02:40-05:00April 24th, 2015|career, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Nurses Week: Time to Celebrate (Not Denigrate) Nursing’s Worth

shawnkennedyBy Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

So, on the cusp of Nurses Week, the week when Americans are encouraged to think about the value that nurses bring to health care, readers of the New York Times were treated to an op-ed written by physician Sandeep Jauhar. According to the byline, Jauhar is a cardiologist and the author of an upcoming memoir about his disillusionment as a physician. The title of the piece was “Nurses Are Not Doctors.” While the author makes sure to reassure us that he thinks nurse practitioners (NPs) have a valuable role to play in health care, he makes the usual charge that NPs are not qualified to practice primary care without physician supervision.

Jauhar conveniently ignores the many studies that have refuted this argument, while basing his case largely on weak anecdotes and one study from 1999 that showed NPs ordered more diagnostic tests. His conclusion: the NPs in the study ordered too many expensive tests because they lack the experience and knowledge of physicians (he concedes in passing that “there are many reasons the NPs may have ordered more tests”). I can’t help thinking that this piece’s publication was purposely timed to take some of the shine off Nurses Week.

I’m surprised that the Times published such a weak letter. First, along […]

2018-03-28T10:24:54-04:00May 5th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|4 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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