Hello. Thanks for dropping by. This will be the last post on meta4RN.com meta4RN.com attracted visitors from more than 100 countries It is 10 years ago today when the post “Hello World!” jauntily announced the meta4RN.com launch, and the “About” page outlined the rationale and vision for this nursing blog. Since then there have been more than 200 meta4RN.com posts published (they’re all listed here meta4RN.com/contents). Those posts have yielded more than 190,000 words – that’s the length of a PhD thesis, twice . Additionally, meta4RN.com has been adorned with hundreds of images and embedded T ..read more

Drawing on more than 5 years of experience as Social Media Editor for the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, I hereby present an amateurish manifesto in two parts. Feel free to ignore it.   Version 1 (copy & paste from an email I sent on 7 December 2016)   Twitter is a hungry beast. IJMHN will feed it daily with scheduled Tweets promoting its papers/authors. IJMHN will be cautious about entering into conversation with individuals, and is unlikely to retweet much at all, other than an occasional RT of ACMHN tweets. The IJMHN’s standing as a peer-reviewed journal will ..read more

If I stay lucky I should live another 20 or 30 years. I will be dead within the next 40 years. If I stay lucky I will have a good death. Where I live, as of 1st January 2023 good deaths don’t need to rely on luck alone. Voluntary assisted dying will become a sanctioned option for those who meet the legal criteria [here]. If I stay lucky my death will be a bit like Queen Elizabeth’s recent death. I’ll be incredibly wealthy, I’ll die at a place of my choosing, I’ll be with people I’m related to, like or employ, and I will spend my last days doing things I value and enjoy. If I stay lucky, when I ..read more

Cairns Hospital Grand Rounds on Friday 9 September coincided with 2022’s Body Image and Eating Disorders Awareness Week (#BIEDAW). Understandably, it was planned that the session should focus on eating disorders. Dr Janet Bayley, Consultant Psychiatrist with NQuEDS* was to present, but was unexpectedly unavailable. Janet passed the baton to Dr Sharmila Prakash, Consultant Psychiatrist with Cairns Hospital’s Consultation Liaison Psychiatry Service. Unfortunately, Sharmila also became unexpectedly unavailable. That’s where – Steven Bradbury style – I slid-in to be on the Cairns Hospital Grand Ro ..read more

This blog post is to simply share the content, JPEG and PDF of a poster that will be presented at the FNQ (Far North Queensland)/CHHHS (Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service) Research and Innovation Symposium on 16 September 2022. EAT Target (Eating disorder planned Admission via Transit lounge) Background and Rationale It was observed there was a prolonged delay in commencing nasogastric feeds for some people who had a planned admissions via the Cairns Hospital Transit Lounge for nutritional resuscitation in relapse of an eating disorder. Delayed nutritional resuscitation in eati ..read more

The 2022 FNQ (Far North Queensland)/CHHHS (Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service) Research and Innovation Symposium is scheduled for Friday 16 September. 2022 FNQ/@CairnsHHS Research and Innovation Symposium Cairns Hospital Auditorium and Online Friday 16 September Research excellence in the tropics Registrations open 29 August https://t.co/r9VhDkoo3b pic.twitter.com/9WT3JiTG8A — Paul McNamara (@meta4RN) August 23, 2022 https://cairns.health.qld.libguides.com/chhhs-researchsymposium/home Read all about it: cairns.health.qld.libguides.com/chhhs-researchsymposium/home This blog ..read more

About eighteen months ago I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book on Mental Health in Emergency Care. The chapter was to be named “Supporting the person diagnosed with a personality disorder who presents to the Emergency Department following intentional self-harm”.   Pretty-much straight away I asked Enara Larcombe to co-produce/co-write the chapter with me. Co-production is in keeping with the “nothing about us without us” idea (which has gained a lot of buy-in from senior mental health nurses). My reasons for asking were: It’s good manners It would impr ..read more

Next month there is an Eating Disorder Forum at Cairns Hospital. Amongst the teams presenting is the team is the Consultation Liaison Psychiatry Service (CLPS). This blog post aims simply to serve as an easy-to-find landing spot for the CLPS presentation. Here is the link to the presentation (on Prezi). The session is designed to be a narrative. Relying mostly on screenshots of what ieMR file entries* look like, the presentation is just a prop to keep the narrative of the presentation on-topic. The main themes are: the role of the Consultation Liaison Psychiatry Service (spoiler alert: it in ..read more

Today on Twitter, out of the blue, Mick Blair reminded me of a twenty-year-old poster. pic.twitter.com/1nGqPDOqNB — Mick (@Mickholloways) August 8, 2022 Sometime in the early 2000s (2001 or 2002, I think) my local health service went on a recruitment drive titled, “Nursing in the Tropics: Experience the Lifestyle!”. The poster featured ten nurses. Nine of the nurses are female and doing stuff. One of the nurses is male and just standing around not obviously participating in a task. That nurse is me. However, to be fair, I may have been reflecting on-, or planning for-, something important ..read more

Coral Wilkinson has been a Registered Nurse for over 30 years. We’ve crossed clinical paths a lot, especially during Coral’s stints as a Clinical Nurse Consultant and Nurse Navigator for older persons, and when she was working on the Aged Care Assessment Team. Coral is one of those very capable and kind characters – the sort of person who lifts the standard and reputation of nursing. In recent years Coral has started an organisation called See Me Aged Care Navigators which is described as ‘the human compass you need to guide and support you through Australia’s aged care system’. As an adj ..read more