June Issue Highlights: PPE Shortages, Opioid Use Disorder, More

“Nurses’ work has become powerfully visible.”—editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy in her June editorial, “Nurses: Courageous, Committed, and Fed Up”

The cover image of our June issue is a watercolor painting, Human, by Ohio artist Jim Leitz. Created in March, the painting is a tribute to the experiences of frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The June issue is now live, and features continuing coverage of COVID-19, plus many articles on other topics in nursing and health care. Here’s what’s new:

Original Research: The Relationship Between Food Insecurity and Cost-Related Medication Nonadherence in Older Adults: A Systematic Review

The authors conducted a comprehensive review of the literature to explore the connection between these two significant public health issues. The evidence suggests a correlation and points to the need for more effective interventions.

Opioid Use Disorder: Pathophysiology, Assessment, and Effective Interventions

A review of the development of opioid use disorder, available screening tools, medical treatments, and behavioral interventions that have demonstrated efficacy in reducing substance use.

Back to Basics: Abnormal Basic Metabolic Panel Findings: Implications for Nursing

In this article in a new series designed to improve acute care nurses’ understanding of laboratory abnormalities, the author discusses important values in the basic metabolic panel, including the electrolytes potassium and chloride as […]

2020-05-26T09:23:33-04:00May 26th, 2020|Nursing|0 Comments
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An Unimaginable Year of the Nurse and the Midwife

This year’s Nurses Week may be remembered for what didn’t happen.

For nursing, this was to be a year of celebration, of bringing attention to the vital role nurses play as the largest group of health professionals, providing most of the health care to the world. There were commemorative events planned for May 12 to mark the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale and in October an international conference to end a year of highlighting nurses and the nursing profession. In the United States, the American Nurses Association (ANA) changed the annual May Nurses Week to Nurses Month. AJN planned several articles and covers throughout the year, including this issue’s guest editorial on the first-ever State of the World’s Nursing report.

COVID-19 has focused worldwide attention on the vital importance of nursing.

While in-person events have all been canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, what has not been lost is the attention to what nurses do and their courage and commitment to provide care to all who need it. And as with colleagues who performed their duties in other pandemics, combat zones, and life-threatening disasters, nurses today have not flinched in the face of great personal risk. I’m in awe of nurses who traveled from around […]

2020-05-07T10:18:35-04:00May 7th, 2020|Nursing|1 Comment
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A Message from Frontline Nurses: Let’s Keep the Real Enemy in Sight

The recent protests against stay-at-home restrictions across the country are painful to watch for nurses most affected by the pandemic, those caring for COVID-19 patients. Four RNs working in hospitals in New York City who are graduate students at the Lienhard School of Nursing at Pace University decided to work together with one of their professors to share their thoughts on behalf of nurses on the front lines.

There are refrigerator trucks filled with bodies outside our hospitals. Many of us have to pass by them when we go into work, knowing that among those bodies are the patients we cared for yesterday and when we leave 12 hours later, some of the patients we cared for today will join them. Even harder to handle is the knowledge that among those bodies may be a colleague or friend, fellow nurses who caught COVID-19 while caring for others. It is heartbreaking and terrifying because we know that we too could end up in a body bag shelved in a refrigerator truck.

So, it is no wonder that the sight of people protesting protective measures generates such strong emotions for us—anger, fear, sadness. Anger that in choosing to ignore restrictions, or insisting on the right to risk their own health, they […]

2021-01-21T11:07:20-05:00April 29th, 2020|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective, Public health, students|7 Comments
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As Conflicting Recommendations Sow Public Confusion, Nurses Still Lack Adequate PPE and Equipment

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, nurse epidemiologist and AJN clinical editor. April 3.

One problem central to the experience of nurses during this pandemic is the disastrous lack of essential supplies and equipment. How different would your work days be right now if you had plenty of PPE and ventilators? In the parts of the country with the most COVID-19 cases, this problem is far from being resolved. In many other cities and states, unbelievably (after three months), you are likely to be faced with it soon.

Where is our PPE?

For weeks, nurses and physicians in states that were initially hardest hit by the pandemic (New York, California, Washington) have reported severe shortages of personal protective equipment. (See, for example, this ICU nurse’s anonymously published note to AJN.) Respiratory protection has been in particularly short supply. In many hospitals, staff are reusing one droplet mask or N95 respirator for an entire shift or longer. These dire circumstances were predictable. A  2015 article from researchers at the National Institutes of Health predicted that in a pandemic in which only 20 to 30 percent of the population is infected, up to 7.3 billion N95 respirators would be needed. COVID-19 is likely to infect a considerably higher percentage of the population. Where are our masks? […]

2021-01-21T11:08:39-05:00April 3rd, 2020|infectious diseases, Nursing, Public health|3 Comments
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Deserted: Note from a Young ICU Nurse as COVID-19 Pandemic Intensifies in U.S.

The following note came to us from a young ICU nurse in New York State. Based on other accounts we are hearing, her working conditions and the risks they put her and her colleagues in may be far from unusual at the current moment. 

Coworkers and I are feeling a vast array of emotions and one of the worst ones we feel is deserted—we hear very little from hospital administrators (except when management comes to sign out our daily masks to us).

Our earliest confirmed COVID case was not isolated or swabbed for COVID until the day he died (at which point countless staff had been exposed). Several of us nurses requested that the patient be tested earlier in his admission, but mostly due to lack of preparedness and testing protocols on the hospital’s part, the patient was not tested until the fifth day of his admission.

Meanwhile, hospital administrators had sent us text messages telling us that we were not allowed to use any masks in patient rooms unless the patient was officially ordered for isolation precautions, in anticipation of PPE shortages. So, despite our suspicions that the patient had COVID, we were not able to protect ourselves. Hospital staff like me who worked closely with the patient were not informed that he had become an official suspected case until after test results came back, resulting in widespread exposures to staff and their families. The overwhelmed occupational health department gave very little guidance […]

2020-03-25T11:19:40-04:00March 25th, 2020|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective, Public health|13 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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