Nursing shortage Archives - Page 4 of 4

‘Go Home, Stay, Good Nurse’: Hospital Staffing Practices Suck the Life Out of Nurses

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

After I last wrote to you from the NTI (the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses’ annual National Teaching Institute and Critical Care Exposition), I headed back to the exhibit hall to check out the helicopter and the Army’s mobile operating tent. But I didn’t get to either one, because I met a young critical care nurse from a regional hospital in Missouri. We chatted about her workplace, and it was obvious that she was very proud of the work she and her colleagues did. When I asked her, “What’s your biggest issue?”, she said that it was probably staffing. I expected her to cite the shortage and the difficulty of finding qualified critical care nurses. But that wasn’t what she meant—rather she was talking about bare-bones staffing because of tight budgets. Her hospital routinely switches between two tactics: it sends nurses home when the patient census is low (when this happens, the nurses are paid only $2 an hour to be on call, but must still use a vacation day to retain full-time benefits, a tactic that rapidly depletes their vacation time); or, when the patient census is higher, the hospital imposes mandatory overtime, creating havoc in nurses’ schedules, finances, and personal lives. And people wonder why there’s a nursing shortage! […]

Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)2017-03-28T13:15:48-04:00May 20th, 2010|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research, safe staffing|34 Comments

AJN’s Top 10 Articles in 2009

So, what were the most highly viewed articles of 2009 on AJNonline?

Here’s our Top Ten list – check them out:

1. Sex and Violence in the Media Influence Teen Behavior – duh!

2. Recognizing Sepsis in the Adult Patient – every nurse should know what to look for

3. Bullying Among Nurses – sad reminder that we might be our own worst enemy

4. Leech Therapy – it may be disconcerting, but it works wonders

5. The Marketing of Osteoporosis – how they turned a risk factor into a disease

6. The Nursing Shortage – this problem’s not going away soon

7. Understanding and Managing Burn Pain: Part 1 – it’s still misunderstood . . . and undertreated

8. Infection Control: Whose Job Is It? – unsafe nursing practices, you say?

9. Staging Pressure Ulcers: What’s the Buzz in Wound Care? – definitions matter!

10. Do Rapid Response Teams Save Lives? – well, it sounded like a neat idea . . .

–Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:20:13-05:00January 13th, 2010|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment

Helping Nurses Overcome Barriers to the Baccalaureate

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, interim editor-in-chief

It’s not always easy for a nurse with an associate’s degree to obtain a baccalaureate. Many may have families to care for or support. Financial and time pressures can be considerable. The part-time community college model is great when it comes to obtaining the associate’s degree, but then many who want to advance find the door closed: they can’t afford the higher tuition at a local private school offering the baccalaureate, or they can’t travel from a rural community to an urban center where a city or state school is located, or they need to do a portion of their coursework on a part-time basis. With such barriers in place, how will we ever solve the nursing shortage?

These problems are being addressed. Last week I had the opportunity to speak with several faculty from the program in nursing at Queensborough Community College (QCC), City University of New York, including Tina Iakovou and Marge Riley, both assistant professors; Anne Marie Menendez, chair of the program; and Lucy O’Leary, a “student success advocate.” The meeting took place at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City. Also present were Christine Tanner, a distinguished professor at Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), and Marilyn DeLuca, formerly of the Jonas Center for Nursing Excellence.

We were there to discuss the unique collaboration QCC has with Hunter-Bellevue, one based on a model developed by Tanner and colleagues in Oregon. Tanner […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:20:31-05:00December 21st, 2009|Nursing|0 Comments

Shortage of School Nurses Means Greater Student Vulnerability to H1N1

By Alison Bulman, AJN senior editorial coordinator

the school bus routine by woodley wonderworks, via Flickr.

On Friday the New York Times reported that a shortage of school nurses is making students more vulnerable to the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus, stating that ” [m]any districts have few or no nurses to prevent or respond to outbreaks, leaving students more vulnerable to a virus that spreads easily in classrooms and takes a heavier toll on children and young adults.”

The article acknowledges the key role played by school nurse Mary Pappas, who we interviewed for this blog shortly after she’d helped identify the first U.S. cases of H1N1 at a school in Queens. As AJN reported in June, school nurses have been and will continue to be on the front lines of efforts to prevent or manage outbreaks. But the school nursing shortage is acute, with just one nurse for every 1,155 students nationally, a ratio that the American Federation of Teachers has called “dangerous.” With a new school year underway, the Times reports, school districts are relying more heavily on non–health care personnel to identify and isolate sick kids and monitor absences.

For more on issues related to school nurses and nursing, see these recent posts:

Can School Nurses Help Prevent Heat Stroke Fatalities in High School Football?

Nurse Organizations Oppose Move to Allow Non-Licensed Personnel to Give Insulin to Students