This painting by emergency physician Lindsey Ball is one of 40 in a series in which Ball painted on deidentified photocopies of electrocardiograms (ECGs). See our “On the Cover” column to learn more. The August issue of AJN is now live. “An ED visit and ensuing hospitalization are frightening experiences for anyone, and potentially more [...] The post Nurses’ Experiences as Patients: Recommended Reading from AJN’s August Issue appeared first on Off the Charts ..read more

This summer the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a health advisory as countries in the Americas report 9.7 million cases of dengue, the highest number in any year. The United States and Puerto Rico have reported 2,559 cases of dengue since January. The CDC expects the numbers to continue to rise as the environment warms. Nurses in every specialty, but especially those who prepare individuals and families for international travel, will want to know about this latest dengue surge. All U.S. nurses will want to know how to triage, manage, and follow-up these patients to ..read more

The July issue of AJN is now live. To what degree are nurses familiar with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and their relevance to nursing practice? Read this month’s Original Research article, “Nurses’ Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding the Sustainable Development Goals: A Global Study,” to find out. (A mural depicting Goal 6,  clean water and sanitation, is featured on the cover.) In “Reducing Lung Injury from Blind Insertion of Small-Bore Feeding Tubes,” the authors describe a quality improvement project involving the implementation of capnography-guided small-bore f ..read more

Nursing roles in diabetes management. A continuous glucose monitor reader (or a smartphone app) scans the sensor attached to the patient’s body for interstitial fluid glucose level and can provide data such as average blood glucose level or percentage of time spent in a target range over a given period of time. Knowledge is power. When a person with diabetes knows their blood glucose levels, they can better self-manage lifestyle choices and medications and be an active participant in preventing complications. Glucose information can be obtained through a variety of methods. The majority of p ..read more

The salary gap between clinical and faculty roles. Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash There is a national shortage of nursing faculty to educate the future nurse workforce. The biggest barrier to recruiting and retaining nursing faculty is the salary gap between the faculty and clinical nursing roles. Nurses routinely take pay cuts of as much as $40,000 when leaving clinical practice to teach full-time. The faculty role is vital to the health of the profession, and it is particularly important to recruit excellent educators with relevant clinical experience. The salary gap raises a clear q ..read more

Oil painting of Clara Barton by Mathilde Leisenring, 1937. Clara Barton lived an amazing life with extraordinary accomplishments, as a group of us recently learned on a tour retracing her steps (this will be the final post in the series). But it was an unlikely, even improbable, journey. She was painfully shy, suffered from anxiety and depression, and had to endure discrimination due to her gender, marital status, and age. Out of these challenges, she became a teacher and started the first public school in New Jersey; was among the first women appointed to government work, serving in the U.S ..read more

“I was fascinated to learn the site was discovered in 1996, saved by a government worker who was preparing the site for demolition when he discovered historical documents in the attic!” Recognizing a need for information and meeting it. Photo credit: Cynthia Leaver In the course of our tour following the footsteps of Clara Barton, my admiration for her courage, confidence, and strength in character—yes, fortitude is the word that comes to mind—continues to grow. A trip to the Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington, D.C., has only added further confirmation of Barton’s character ..read more

Antietam battlefield, seen from the observation tower. Photo credit: Lewis Sandy. As it happens, this summer’s #1 best-selling book is Kristin Hannah’s The Women, which tells the story of Frankie, a young idealist nurse who volunteers to serve in Vietnam. This harrowing tale takes her fresh out of Army basic training to the Thirty Sixth Evac Hospital, where she and her fellow nurses triage the wounded, provide care for the dying, and stabilize soldiers for further treatment at other hospitals, while coming under attack. Women at the front? The concept of battlefield triage? The idea of a “fi ..read more

“You have never known me without work; while able, you never will.” – Clara Barton Yesterday on day three of our ongoing Clara Barton tour we visited Barton’s home in Glen Echo, Maryland. As a brand new nursing graduate and history lover, learning about the dedication of the courageous woman who paved the way for me and millions of others is a humbling experience. Barton’s fame as a selling point for a new town. Clara Barton lived and worked in Glen Echo, located a little over seven miles from Washington, D.C., and overlooking the Potomac River, until her death in 1912. Barton was an e ..read more

The author speaking to the Clara Barton tour group before the Tiffany stained glass windows at national Red Cross headquarters. “Because of the climate crisis, the Red Cross launches nearly twice as many relief operations for major disasters than it did a decade ago.” Today a group of us tracing the career and legacy of Clara Barton arrived at the ornate national Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C., a building I have been at countless times over my last 48 years of volunteering. Every time I enter, it reminds me of the people who have worked so hard to help millions of people h ..read more