Public health Archives - Page 9 of 10

What’s Ugly? — And Other Crucial Conversations for Nurses

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Our monthly Art of Nursing department—often, a poem or image somehow related to health care—is a unique feature for a scholarly publication, but one we feel strongly about. We believe that in order to provide truly holistic care, nurses need to know about more than evidence-based clinical content—they also need to be aware of many other aspects of the human experience.

One thing art teaches us is that people don’t always see things the same way. What’s beautiful, illuminating, or at least useful to one person may be ugly or offensive to another. Consider billboards with public health messages. To some, such a billboard may seem to be an eyesore blotting the landscape; to others, the image and message is a powerful tool for disseminating life-saving information. Our September 2010 Art of Nursing (click through to the PDF version) showcased billboards in Guinea-Bissau, a poor country with HIV prevalence of epidemic proportions. The billboards, photographed by Dawn Starin (here’s a blog post she wrote about them), are used to encourage people to get tested. A blog post by AJN senior editor Sylvia Foley about the column noted concerns some had expressed about these billboards:

Are the billboards effective? Starin writes, “Although the billboards are fabulous to look at, many health professionals I spoke with thought they exemplified time and money wasted, in part because of the high nationwide illiteracy rate.” One health worker emphasized the need for more culture-specific studies on sexual practices and tradition, so that appropriate education […]

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Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:13:30-05:00April 18th, 2011|Nursing|12 Comments

Fighting Malaria with Public Health Billboards and Mosquito Nets

By Dawn Starin

The metal billboard in the photo stands in the main marketplace on the island of Bubaque, the second largest in Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagós Archipelago. It depicts a mother and child sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net. Translated into English, the text reads, “Malaria kills more pregnant women and children. Always sleep underneath the mosquito net.” But it’s not clear whether it gets its crucial message across effectively.

Half the global population—about 3.3 billion people—is at risk for contracting malaria, a parasitic infection transmitted by mosquitoes. The disease kills close to one million people each year; 91% of these deaths occur in Africa. A major global campaign, Roll Back Malaria (RBM), was launched in 1998 with a mandate “to implement coordinated action to combat malaria” worldwide; some 500 organizations now take part.

One RBM effort in sub-Saharan Africa (an area that includes Guinea-Bissau) is aimed at getting more people to use insecticide-treated bed nets, since the parasite-carrying mosquitoes are reportedly only active at night. In Africa malaria accounts for one in five deaths in children.

Pregnant women are also at high risk, as they’re bitten by the mosquitoes twice as often as nonpregnant women. Why? According to a study published in 2000 in the Lancet, pregnant women have a higher body temperature and warmer skin and produce […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:14:46-05:00December 2nd, 2010|Nursing|2 Comments

The Grave Dangers Facing Medical Aid Workers in ‘Insecure’ Regions

I recently heard from Jacqueline Koch, a senior communications officer with the global medical aid group, Merlin. As described in a recent AJN photo-essay on Merlin’s work in Gaza (for the best view, click through to the PDF version), the organization partners with local health organizations and trains health workers to provide care in response to natural and man-made disasters. Ms. Koch has now shared with AJN a first-person account of one Pakistani woman’s experiences working with flood victims, which includes a description of that worker’s own family’s suffering as a result of the flood. This account, which will appear tomorrow along with several photos, is prefaced below by Ms. Koch, who provides context for Azra Habib’s story. The security issues raised by Ms. Koch are frightening, in that we now see an already taxing kind of health care work becoming even more perilous because of the threat of physical attacks like the murder of 10 medical aid workers in Afghanistan back in August.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor

‘Senseless […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:15:33-05:00September 29th, 2010|Nursing|3 Comments

Nightingale, One More Time

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I know we’ve written a lot about Florence Nightingale on this blog recently (see Susan Hassmiller’s series of posts, In Florence’s Footsteps: Notes from a Journey) and I don’t want to put off those who aren’t necessarily fans, but I came across an editorial written by Gloria Donnelly, editor-in-chief of Holistic Nursing Practice, that resonated with me. She writes about how the holistic nature of Nightingale’s approach fits with much that’s going on today in health care reform, citing as one example the trend toward teaching people to take charge of their own health. (The entire Fall issue highlights the work of holistic practitioners—I especially liked Garden Walking for Depression: A Research Report.)

Donnelly writes:

We believe that Ms. Nightingale, an advocate of health, self-healing, and healthy environments, would be proud of the strides that nurses have made to promote holistic health and care around the world. . . . Nightingale believed that ’health nursing‘ and cultivating good health were equally important to ’sick nursing,’ the art and principles of which she developed almost single-handedly. Prevention superceded cure in Nightingale’s schema as she advocated for Health Missioners to work, first in the villages of rural India and then in England, teaching women how to prevent disease and maintain healthy environments.

This, in a nutshell, describes nursing at its core. It’s a shame that of all of Nightingale’s philosophies and improvements that were […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:15:54-05:00September 2nd, 2010|health care policy, nursing perspective|1 Comment

Fighting HIV–AIDS with Public Health Billboards: September ‘Art of Nursing’

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

On a recent trip to the capital of Guinea-Bissau, Dawn Starin noticed numerous public health billboards urging people to get tested for HIV or to practice safer sex by wearing condoms. One of the six poorest countries in the world, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, Guinea-Bissau faces an ongoing epidemic of HIV and AIDS. Prevalence is especially high in urban areas and among pregnant women and sex workers. Starin, a writer and a research associate in the department of anthropology at University College London, UK, was struck by the bright colors and larger-than-life figures in the billboards, and photographed several, including the one featured in the September Art of Nursing.

Are the billboards effective? Starin writes, “Although the billboards are fabulous to look at, many health professionals I spoke with thought they exemplified time and money wasted, in part because of the high nationwide illiteracy rate.” One health worker emphasized the need for more culture-specific studies on sexual practices and tradition, so that appropriate education programs could be developed.

Starin has also photographed public art by Thongleum Damviengkum, a mixed-media artist whose work appeared in the April Art of Nursing. Damviengkum’s often witty pieces, intended to raise public awareness about HIV and AIDS and address the stigma associated with having the disease, are on display at a restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand. “Humor is important if you want people to listen,” […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:15:57-05:00August 30th, 2010|Nursing|5 Comments