A Measure of Contentment: One Patient’s Daily Ritual

By Annelisa Ochoa for AJN By Annelisa Ochoa for AJN

“A Measure of Contentment,” the August Reflections essay in AJN, describes the daily ritual of a resident in a long-term care facility. As author Nancy Ngaruiya shows us, nurses and other health care providers can sometimes notice, and support, the small pleasures and routines that make life worthwhile for patients.

Of this patient, she writes:

We make our own happiness. We define what makes us content, what actions help us find that happiness. Sometimes the recipe takes just a few ingredients. Even in an environment where freedom is limited, where rules dictate when to wake up and go to bed, what days of the week we will get assistance with a full bath and who will do it, what meals and activities are or are not available, he has defined what makes him content, perhaps even happy.

The patient in question happens to be one of those who often get frustrated, who aren’t always grateful or helpful—those who tend to be labeled as “challenging” or “difficult” by overworked providers. It’s easy to notice only the frustration of people who’ve watched their worlds shrink bit by bit as their freedoms and abilities diminish along with their health. […]

2016-11-21T13:01:02-05:00August 3rd, 2016|Nursing, nursing stories, patient experience|2 Comments
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Ebola Changes You: Reflections of a Nurse Upon Return from Liberia

By Deborah Wilson, RN. The author is currently an IV infusion therapist with the Berkshire Visiting Nurses Association in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and is completing her BSN at UMass Amherst. In October, she returned from Liberia, where she worked with Doctors Without Borders at a 120-bed Ebola treatment center. Names of patients mentioned in the article have been changed to protect patient privacy.

At the cemetery, newly dug graves At the cemetery, newly dug graves

I have recently returned from Liberia, where I worked as a nurse for six weeks along with a dedicated team of physicians, nurses, and other professionals, treating 60 to 80 Ebola patients a day. My 21-day transition time is recently over and, although I am back at work and school, my heart is with the West African nurses who I worked with for those weeks in September and October.

I worked in a town called Foya, managing a 120-bed Ebola treatment center (ETC). During the first two weeks, I wondered if I would last. In the grueling heat, dressed up in all that personal protective equipment (PPE), constantly sprayed with chlorine, each day I was haunted by the question of whether I’d somehow gotten infected.

It all took its toll. Twice a shift the nursing team would put on PPE and […]

2016-11-21T13:03:33-05:00November 12th, 2014|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|19 Comments
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A Physician Finally Gets Nursing

RelmanArticleCaptureBy Shawn Kennedy, editor-in-chief

Earlier this month, the New York Review of Books published an article by a patient who described his hospital stay following a life-threatening accident. This was no ordinary patient—the author, Arnold Relman, is a noted physician, emeritus professor of medicine at Harvard, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, and along with his wife Marcia Angell, well known as a critic of the “medical–industrial complex.” His account is very detailed and gives a good example of how it can look when the system works (and when one has access to it).

His understanding of his condition and treatment, his knowledge of the system, and also his relative prominence as an individual, all undoubtedly helped him avoid some pitfalls and make a remarkable full recovery. However, as a number of others have pointed out recently, one comment in his account was surprising.

In reflecting on his hospitalization and recovery, he wrote, “I had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled. This is a lesson all physicians and hospital administrators should learn. When nursing is not optimal, patient care is never good.” After all his years in medicine, he only realized the value of nursing as a 90-year-old trauma patient.

This week, Lawrence Altman, another physician and author, wrote an excellent […]

2016-11-21T13:05:23-05:00February 14th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, patient safety|13 Comments
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Patient Decisions: When You’re Just Not Up to Making the Call

By Karen Roush, MS, RN, FNP, clinical managing editor

Photo by the author Photo by the author

For most patients and in most clinical situations, decision making is and should be a shared process between the patient and the clinician (and often the family). But there are some cases when we, expert clinicians versed in scientific and experiential knowledge, need to make a decision for the patient—not out of some paternalistic idea of our authority or superiority, but because the patient really wants or needs us to take on that burden.

I was six months pregnant with my second child. The pregnancy had gone smoothly, which was a blessing after having delivered my first child 10 weeks premature following two weeks spent in a tertiary care center. That pregnancy had been problematic from the beginning—early bleeding, and then a hemorrhage at five months, at which time they’d diagnosed me with placenta previa. It was one of those pregnancies where you were thankful for each additional day that brought you closer to the nine-month mark.

But this time, everything was going smoothly—no bleeding or cramps, an active baby that ultrasounds confirmed was growing well . . . until one morning in February, when I started with cramps that progressed to pain and a lot of pressure. An hour later, I was in the labor and […]

2016-11-21T13:05:37-05:00January 17th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, patient engagement, patient experience|1 Comment
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Guess Who’s Wearing Housekeeping Garb Now? Surprise! It’s Your Nurse

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, writes a monthly post for this blog and works as an infusion nurse in outpatient oncology.

Catch-all: noun [usu. as modifier]

a term or category that includes a variety of different possibilities: ex. the stigmatizing catch-all term “schizophrenia”

American Hospital/by J. Paradisi American Hospital/by J. Paradisi

The first thought that came to mind after I heard that Vanderbilt University Medical Center had laid off its housekeeping staff and assigned cleaning patient rooms to nursing was this: Has anyone from the hospital’s administration ever looked inside the nursing staff’s refrigerators, microwaves, or sinks?

Universally, nurses’ staff lounge kitchens nearly rank biohazard status. In every unit a single nurse, but often it’s the unit secretary, martyrs herself (or himself) by emptying these refrigerators of forgotten food. She washes the moldy containers and places them on a nearby countertop, with this message scrawled in Sharpie:

CONTAINERS NOT TAKEN HOME BY WEDNESDAY WILL BE THROWN OUT! (Caps intended)

Another sign commonly posted above the staff lounge sink or microwave by this same nurse or unit secretary reads:

CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF! YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T LIVE HERE!

Fact: Nurses know a lot about infection control, but this does not automatically make us good housekeepers. Besides, nurses already have a job: keeping hospitalized patients safe while assessing their needs and administering their care.

While Vanderbilt’s decision to lay off its housekeeping staff and […]

2018-03-28T10:28:19-04:00October 28th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|15 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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