“We Don’t Care What’s On Your Head. We Care What’s In It.”
So there’s this thing in Quebec which I’m sure my Canadian readers have heard of and maybe also a few of my American readers, which involves the Quebec government devising…
Good Nursing Practice is Practising with the Heart and Mind
Where does the Rot Start in Nursing Home Abuse?
This story has been bouncing around the Canadian media since last May. Camille Parent, the son of a nursing home resident, set up a hidden camera in his mother’s room…
A Blogger, Allegedly
So, it’s been awhile, eh? It was Chuck Norris who found me. To everyone who emailed and texted and Tweeted, thanks. Everything is hunky and dory. I’m not dead, ok?…
Privacy, judgment and ethics aside, I have caring to do.
A few years ago I cared for an acquaintance. She was a friend of a friend who had been living out of the country for several years, but had come…
Treat the Patient Not the Disease
Abscesses and wounds, and especially abscesses and wounds which are infected, suppurative, purulent, and generally awful, are embarrassing for patients and difficult for nurses. Embarrassing for patients because they are…
Generation Gaps
I recently took a course with nurses of varied years of experience and ages, but it was primarily made up of fairly new graduate nurses within the last year or…
How Nurses Practice
Working on a PowerPoint presentation, and did up this (yet to be formatted) slide: Which column do you think represents the current state of nursing practice? Filed under: Good Nursing…
Guest Post: How We Can Fix the Malaise in the Nursing Profession
Nurse Practitioner (Photo credit: ekea7) by Amanda Trujillo If the newer generations of nurses out there are more confused than ever about their roles in healthcare — they should be.…
Nurses Practice Beyond Their Scope — And It’s Not a Bad Thing
A very good, if obvious, idea on the use of RNs: nurses should be used to the full extent of their abilities. From the Toronto Star (and kudos to the…
Nurses Grieve Too
An underexplored or ignored aspect of nursing professional life: how nurses working in a Labour and Delivery unit grieve over the loss of their patients, and how this grief affects…
What I Have Learned from Nursing
The world of nursing on a couple of dozen flash cards. From The Nursing Channel on YouTube. While I don’t agree necessarily with every card — some of them, I…
Nurse Love, The Real Kind
Some real nurse love — and incidentally reminding us why we have the most tremendous profession in the world and how we each day make a powerful difference in the…
Breastfeeding Makes Sane People Crazy
Why does any discussion of breastfeeding makes people a little insane? I don’t exclude myself: even I get a little agitated. Here are some examples of what I mean: Exhibit…
More on When Labelling Patients Causes Patients to Die
In the comments WhiteCoat (of WhiteCoat’s Call Room fame) strenuously objects to my take on the Anna Brown case: Wow. Someone on my blog suggested that I check out this…
On Your Feet, Nurse, the Doctor’s Here!
Should nurses give up their chairs for physicians? A nursing professor named Susan Kieffer writing at NurseTogether.com thinks so: If you have been a nurse for any length of time,…
Easter 2012
Happy Easter. One thing you may or may not know about me, dear readers, is that I’m a retired Catholic. Like many other people, I left because what some Catholics…
When Labelling Patients Causes Patients to Die
I found this story how a homeless woman died very disturbing: Anna Brown wasn’t leaving the emergency room quietly. She yelled from a wheelchair at St. Mary’s Health Center security…
Arizona is Where Educating Patients is Bad, Bad, Bad: An Amanda Trujillo Update
Just a few words about Amanda Trujillo. Jennifer Olin at RNCentral.com has detailed at the latest twists and turns of her case. I won’t repeat everything, but I want to…
Scripting Nurses is Bad for Patient Care
This might be a new low in nursing management. Instead of actually providing caring, empathy and compassion, some hospitals would like nurses to provide a simulacrum of caring, empathy and…
Nursing Makes Nurses Less Empathetic
Irony alert! The best way to decrease empathy in nurses, apparently, is to actually practice nursing. A new study of nursing students found that as students gained more clinical exposure,…