Don’t Write Off Community College to Start a Nursing Career

By Karen Roush, MSN, RN, FNP-C, AJN clinical managing editor

KarenRoushMy daughter is about to start her nursing career. She’s got all her prereqs out of the way and she’s waiting to hear from the half-dozen colleges she applied to. Among them is the community college where I started my career 35 years ago. That’s right—a community college that confers an associate degree.

I hope she gets in.

Community colleges are seen by many as the bottom of the ladder of desired schools of nursing. Not only do they offer only a two-year degree, but they’re not seen as being as selective as four-year colleges and they don’t have the big name professors.

But community colleges can and do produce great nurses. Programs are rigorous, so a more liberal admission standard at the onset doesn’t necessarily change the caliber of student who graduates at the end. And once they graduate, they must meet the same standards as students from four-year schools to attain licensure as an RN—everyone takes the same NCLEX. At the time of my graduation, my school had a 98% pass rate, one of the highest in the country.

Community colleges even have some advantages over a lot of four-year programs. They may not have the big names—but really, how many of those big name […]

2016-11-21T13:05:07-05:00March 26th, 2014|career, nursing perspective, students|12 Comments
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Preventing Delirium, The Luxury of Time, Things We Get Right, More: Nursing Blog Roundup

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

Here are a few recent posts of interest at various nursing blogs:

karindalziel/ via Flickr Creative Commons karindalziel/ via Flickr Creative Commons

In the throes of nursing school: An intriguing little pastiche of a poem (does it qualify as a ‘found word’ poem?) can be found at a newish blog, adrienne, {student} nurse, in a short post called anatomy of a bath. In another post, she makes the following observations: “In nursing school, you are not driving the train…You absolutely must keep telling yourself that there is nothing wrong with you.”

Preventing delirium in the ICU: At the INQRI blog (the blog of the Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Institute), a post summarizes some recent research on implementing a “bundle” of practices to increase mobility and reduce sedation in the ICU, all in order to prevent patient delirium, which is known to have many short- and long-term negative effects.

The luxury of time. At Love and Ladybits, the author gets a tantalizing glimpse of the quality of care she’d be able to provide if she had more time to spend with each patient. Of course, this “alternative reality” can’t last, but perhaps it can serve as a touchstone of sorts during […]

2016-11-21T13:05:16-05:00March 7th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Chemical Attack Response, Posts for Nursing Students, Ethical Agonies, Blog Carnivals, More

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

You’re working in the ED of a 300-bed metropolitan hospital one Sunday morning when you receive a radio transmission from a paramedic whose ambulance is en route with a casualty of a suspected nerve gas attack. The paramedic reports that two additional ambulances are also on the way. Nerve gas? You’re stunned. What should you do first?

quinn.anya/via flickr creative common quinn.anya/via flickr creative commons

That’s the start of our 2002 article (free for a month, until October 5) about chemical attacks and their aftermath. Such an event is not an impossibility here in the U.S. Remember the 1995 attacks in Japan, in which sarin gas was released at several points on the Tokyo subways by members of a radical cult, killing 12 and injuring thousands? And there is now convincing evidence (not to mention horrific photos of the many children killed) that the Syrian government used nerve gas on its own people last week despite widespread prohibitions against its use. In fact, USA Today reported that a number of the nurses and physicians who treated the victims of the gas attack may have subsequently died themselves from exposure to the patients’ clothing and skin.

Our 2002 article describes how nerve gas works on the body, the […]

2016-11-21T13:06:39-05:00September 6th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Differentiating Nurse Burnout From Boredom

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

BarriersToAccussParadisi

Nurses frequently discuss burnout. Sometimes it’s called compassion fatigue. Regardless of which term, nurses are at risk because our work requires complex technical skills, an expanding knowledge base, physical endurance, and critical thinking, since a patient’s symptoms often do not present in a manner described in the textbooks studied in nursing school.

Above and beyond this, nurses are expected to display warmth and caring towards their patients, even ones who are rude and argumentative. This alone requires character and self-discipline. Add inadequate staffing ratios to the mix, and it’s easy to understand that at some point, a nurse may become susceptible to burnout or compassion fatigue.

Nursing school graduation and passing NCLEX don’t make you a nurse. These milestones earn you a place at the starting gate. It’s up to the individual nurse to navigate her or his career towards growth and longevity. I clearly remember, several years into my practice, recognizing that I’d reached a point of expertise in which I might not know exactly what to do in any emergency, but whatever intervention I chose would be safe and maintain a patient until the doctor or code team arrived. This was around the same time I stopped feeling nauseous every time I […]

2016-11-21T13:06:45-05:00August 22nd, 2013|career, nursing perspective|6 Comments
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The Heart of a Nurse

By Diane Stonecipher, BSN, RN. The author lives in Texas. Her forthcoming Viewpoint essay in the October issue of AJN, “The Old Becomes New,” will consider aspects of nursing that may be obscured or lost due to overreliance on technology.

Heartstudy by James P. Wells, via Flickr Heartstudy by James P. Wells, via Flickr

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that my initial interest in nursing came as a 10-year-old Yankees baseball fan. I could not get enough of The Mick, Elston Howard, or Mel Stottlemyre on my transistor radio, during televised games, or in my baseball card collection. I decided that I could be the team nurse—take their vital signs, set their broken bones, assess their injuries, and best of all, travel with the team.

This rather irrational desire was solidified when my aunt had a face lift. I was 14 at the time, and she recovered at our house, specifically in my room. She was swollen like a prize fighter, with bloody bandages that needed changing, pain medication to be dispensed, meals to be fed—I was hooked. I am not sure I even knew what a nurse really did, but my heart was stirred.

I sailed through high school, graduated with honors, and left for one of the […]

2018-03-28T10:30:20-04:00August 14th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|17 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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