- Guest Post by Carol Gino, Nurse, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author, and blogger at The Hopeful Healer.
When I was working the night shift, one of my patients- a 44 year old man, had just gone for an angiogram. He had been brought back to the floor afterwards, but began hemorrhaging from his femoral artery. I’d added pressure dressings, laid on heavier sandbags, and then called the intern.
The intern took a while to get to the floor and all the while the patient kept bleeding heavily. When the intern just shook his head and did nothing, I called his resident. When the resident didn’t respond, I called the attending. Now I knew I was in big trouble. It didn’t matter that the patient’s blood pressure was 60/40 by the time I called, it mattered that I had broken protocol.
Read More
Feel free to re-post these letters and please write or call the Arizona State Board of Nursing to ask them to drop all complaints against Amanda Trujillo. Please click here for my original blog post containing all case details.
–
Arizona State Board of Nursing
4747 North 7th Street, Suite 200
Phoenix, AZ 85014-3655
602-771-7800 Phone
602-771-7888 Fax
arizona@azbn.gov Email
http://www.azbn.gov/Default.aspx
To whom it may concern,
Read More
You know I am always on the look-out for awesome entrepreneurial healthcare-related companies, right? Well, I just found one that I’m really excited about!
So even though the company’s founder isn’t a nurse per se, he’s an EMS and a fellow health care entrepreneur and his product line rocks. The smart and funny, Mr. Avi Goldstein, has created a clever little solution to the age-old “where do I stash my tape?” problem for nurses, docs, and first responders of every stripe.
Read More
Guest Post by New York Times #1 Bestselling Author and Registered Nurse, Carol Gino
Okay, so after about 10 hours stiffening into stone sitting in front of a computer screen, I finally decided to get up and move inside, away from reading anything about healthcare. I want light, mindless entertainment. So I flop down on the couch and pick up the remote to begin scanning tonight’s programs. I click through the stations like a man. But the remote always returns to the same station.
Oh God! Grey’s Anatomy. I love Grey’s Anatomy. Why do I love it? There’s nothing like it in the real world. But that’s why I love it. It’s so romantic. It paints such heroes. Heroes I believed in when I was a teenager. Doctors who fall apart when a patient dies, doctors who smooth a patient’s brow for long minutes, doctors who forego dinner at the local pub with their friends in order to play checkers with a patient…..What?
Read More
Tonight’s the night, ya’ll!
RN.FM Radio debuts at 9pm EST tonight, Monday, January 9, 2012.
This evening, Kevin Ross, Keith Carlson and I will be introducing ourselves, discussing our unique vision for the future of nursing, talking about our paths to nurse entrepreneurship and revealing some of the fantastic upcoming guests we’ve got lined up for this Spring.
We hope you’ll join us LIVE and call in with your comments, thoughts, and questions. We really look forward to creating a community and relationship with you on RN.FM Radio.
Read More
It’s a Wonderful Life:
Never Underestimate the Power of Tribes
One of the most memorable Christmas movies of all time is Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” starring the incomparable Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. It’s the ultimate feel-good movie, perfect for anyone who’s ever wondered if their life holds meaning.
Here’s the lowdown: George Bailey, played by Stewart, is on the verge of collapse. His small building and load company is on the verge of bankruptcy, the mean rich man in town is poised to swoop in, and though he has a house full of adorable kids and a gorgeous wife (Reed), there’s never enough money to go around. George decides his family and business would be better off without him. On the brink of suicide, he’s saved by a fledgling angel, Clarence.
Read More
They are the practitioners of the difficult and heroic art of transition, whose ultimate goal is to promote quality of life. Hospice Heroes accept and embrace this gift of providing compassionate end of life care for their patients as a profound mission based on self- sacrifice and a willingness to live for something greater than themselves. They know that care is more than tending to the physical end of life, so they are able to be and act in the present moment to help ease the gnawing fears that the patient, his or her family, and support group feel. Above all, Hospice Heroes understand that death does not have to be painful, joyless, or lacking in dignity.
We have entrusted them with such a profound responsibility, yet we often neglect to provide them with the necessary tools to carry out their mission. In 2006, The National Quality Forum published A National Framework and Preferred Practices for Palliative and Hospice Care Quality: A Consensus Report. This report details the problems hindering healthcare outcomes, the preferred practices to improve healthcare outcomes, and the rationale for developing these practices.
Read More
5 Things They Never Told You in Nursing School
Hey Guys!
Just wanted to say a big hearty THANK YOU!
I just debuted my first eBook on Amazon as $0.99 download (link here and above) and in one day the book has sky-rocketed to #1 in not one, but 2 nursing categories! Due in no small part due to your killer support and awesome engagement!
If you’re thinking about downloading it, but the $0.99 feels a little steep (lol!), here’s a totally unsolicited review by another nurse blogger whom I’ve never met, except that we follow each other on Twitter because we’re both fighting the same good “nurse entrepreneurship” fight!
Read More
Hey Guys!
So this article is an oldie, but a goodie!
I was searching for information on Alternative Nursing Careers and found it on NurseWeek.com. While I don’t agree with all of the suggestions, like “travel nursing being hot right now,” as the travel nursing market has definitely cooled in the last few years, I do like that it highlights alternatives for nurses and the various ways it stimulate outside-of-the-box thinking!
Let me know what you think!
Cheers,
Anna
Roads less traveled
A tour of some of the uncommon career paths in nursing
By Diane Sussman
In 20-plus years of nursing, Donna Doetsch, RN, has been a traveling nurse, a home care nurse, a dialysis nurse, a burn unit nurse, an intensive care nurse and a wound care specialist. But when the Grosse Pointe, Mich., resident began feeling “burned out,” she decided to revisit home care. Now, Doetsch is happily employed as co-director of an assisted living program, where she does everything from counseling families to picking out paint colors.
“I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades, and I love it,” she said. “No day is the same.”
After nine years in med/surg and nine more teaching health sciences, Katherine Ricossa, MS, RN, spends her days “networking, coordinating” and taking her nurse Barbies to schools to talk about health professions.
The Santa Clara, Calif., resident is special projects manager for the state-run Regional Health Occupations Resource Center, which helps communities meet their needs for health care workers by developing occupational programs at local community colleges. “All that experience I gained in nursing I’m applying in a whole new way,” she said. “And it’s fun because you’re not limited to anything except what’s in your own head.”
Both Ricossa and Doetsch reflect what is now the norm in the United States: careers that unfold in two or three stages. Only in their case, they didn’t have to leave nursing to find a satisfying sequel.
What nurses have
What nurses bring to the job market often is underestimated and inadequately understood. “It sounds simplistic, but it’s actually really powerful – the nursing process,” said Karen Johnson Brennan, Ed.D., RN, professor and interim director at the School of Nursing at San Francisco State University.
“By nursing process, I mean the ability to gather data, analyze data, make clinical inferences and take actions, and evaluate those actions,” she continued. “Some people are only good at one aspect – they see only the evaluation part. But nurses see the whole picture.”
Hospitals will always be the largest employers of nurses, but nurses increasingly are being wooed by other sectors such as pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, corporations and law firms. While some areas are good, others are white-hot.
Read More
Hey guys,
Just found this article and wanted to make sure you got a chance to read it. It’s from Nurseweek Magazine in 2002, but the nuggets of wisdom it contains are still as valuable as ever. What’s interesting to me when I read this article is that as great as it was to start a bricks and mortar business back in 2002, it is infinitely easier to start an online business based on your nursing expertise nowadays! We owe a ton of respect and a great deal of our current success to the pioneer nurse entrepreneurs that have gone before us!
Enjoy the article and let me know what you think in the comments box below!
Cheers,
Anna
When Opportunity Knocks…
Nurse entrepreneurs strike out on their own to find richer rewards, challenges
By Bree LeMaire, MS, RN
It was Saturday and Karon White Gibson, RN, and Joy Smith Catterson, RN, were making visits to several patients in their new home care business. They were also on their way to a wedding, so they were dressed more sophisticated than usual for a home visit.
They went to the designated address for the visit where the family welcomed them and offered them a cup of tea. Then they sat and chatted a bit with the family, as they were new in the home care business and wanted to establish a rapport with their patient. The family introduced them to their daughter and her husband.
Following tea and the introductions, White asked, “Where’s the patient?”
“Well, there was no patient because we were at the wrong house,” White said. That was when White and Catterson learned that people like to have nurses visit them, even when they’re not expected.
Read More
