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, they demonstrated a much greater decline in empathy scores over the year than did those with limited clinical experience during
Continue readingTag: Nursing stupidity
Those Emergency Blues: Why Nurses are Furious about the Amanda Trujillo Case
The case of Amanda Trujillo has generated a great deal of passionate commentary across the nursing blogosphere. Trujillo, as you may well know, is the nurse who was fired by Banner Health Del E. Webb Medical Center for requesting multi-disciplinary hospice care case management consult for a pre-transplant patient with end-stage
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Bedside Nursing as Menial and Demeaning
Ian Miller, blogging over at ImpactedNurse.com, notes a disturbing trend in Australia, one, I’m afraid, is becoming more common in North America. “These days,” he writes, “being a nurse is tough. Really tough.” I look around and see many struggling at the bedside. I see the increasing perception that this
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Voices For Amanda Trujillo
Each of them eloquently speaks to the heart of what we do as nurses — and why nurses find how Amanda Trujillo was fired and subsequently reported to the Arizona State Board of Nursing so troubling. (Via The Innovative Nurse.) The first is from Andrew Lopez (Twitter: @nursefriendly.) Kevin Ross
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: The Persecution of Amanda Trujillo
In the ugly, grey world of hospital balance sheets it’s almost a commonplace that physicians generate revenue while nurses represent a cost. Fancy procedures and sub-sub-specialties bring generous income streams, in terms of charging (and profiting) from the provision of a multitude of related services, such as nursing, while nursing
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Karma Sweet Karma
The latest instalment of Nurses Behaving Badly featured the night charge and the day charge (i.e. me) getting a status asthmaticus organized in Resus 1 a few minutes after shift change. It’s probably reasonable to wonder why the two Resus Room nurses weren’t attending (and attentive to) the situation, especially after we
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: What Nursing Leadership Doesn’t Look Like
A small, belated Christmas tale on how not to manage an emergency department. But first a few preliminary points of information. First: in Ontario, front line nurses are generally forbidden from taking vacation over the Christmas holidays, usually from some point from the first or second week of December to
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