Caring. Creating. Cultivating Abundance.
Hey guys,
Hope you’re all enjoying the holidays as much as I am!
Boy, I’ve been hitting the cake and eggnog a little hard these days – I won’t lie, the pants are definitely fitting a little tighter than usual – so it’s back to the gym with a vengeance for me in January!
Anyway, I wanted to give you guys links to 2 guest blog posts I wrote in the last week, so you didn’t miss out on these nuggets!
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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 MoreWow! This article seems to have struck a nerve and generated a ton of controversy over at the PBS website.
I’m super interested in what you guys think!
Wearing the 2 hats of “nurse” and “nurse entrepreneur,” my thoughts on this article are varied…and almost conflicting at times.
Also, what do you guys think when the media uses the term “nursing shortage?”
I’m curious to hear your feelings…
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BY: JASON KANE
Breathe a little easier, baby boomers. The nursing shortage that looked like it might deepen just in time for your retirement may not be so certain after all.
According to a report published Monday in the journal Health Affairs, young registered nurses are now entering the workforce at a rate not seen since the 1970s.
After peaking at 190,000 in 1979, the number of RNs between the ages of 23 and 26 plummeted below 110,000 in the early ’90s. That’s a drop of about 50 percent, bottoming out at 102,000 in 2002.
Graphic courtesy Health Affairs.
Then, unexpectedly, everything changed. Between 2002 and 2009, the number of mid-20-something RNs jumped by 62 percent. According to the report, “If these young nurses follow the same life-cycle employment patterns as those who preceded them — as they appear to be thus far — then they will be the largest cohort of registered nurses ever observed.”
But if your local hospital already has a shortage of nurses, it might be a little early to celebrate the trend. A second Health Affairs study published Monday found that nurses rarely move very far for a job. In fact, 52.5 percent of nurses work within 40 miles of where they attended high school.
Next to teaching, the report shows, nursing is one of the least-mobile professions for women. Without intervention, areas currently struggling to produce RNs probably won’t be seeing an upswing in their numbers any time soon.
The increased numbers also won’t automatically translate to enough nurses who specialize in geriatrics. That, too, will take work.
So what does all that mean for an aging U.S. population? Susan Dentzer, editor-in-chief of Health Affairs and former NewsHour health correspondent, answers our questions below.
These numbers seem relatively optimistic. How will they relate to the nursing shortage?
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Nurse Entrepreneurs upholding the highest standards for their employees as one of BC Business Magazine’s 2011 Best Companies to Work for in British Columbia.
Good job, guys!
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Nurse Next Door, one of North America’s fastest growing home care franchise systems, is proud to announce that they have been named to BC Business Magazine’s 2011 Best Companies to Work for in BC list in the number 3 spot. For the fourth time in five years, Nurse Next Door was acknowledged by the annual program that recognizes thought leading employers in BC.
“We’re honored to be named a top employer again,” said John DeHart, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Nurse Next Door. “Caring for the people who care for our clients is the most important thing we can do. Being named to this list again shows our efforts to admire people and attract the best people are paying off.”
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Great profile, in The Gulf Coast Business Review of Nevco, a business pioneered by a nurse and her son, an attorney.
They started out as a humble Dial-A-Nurse service and have expanded into a large international nursing educational material provider.
Excellent profile and great take-aways!
Let me know your thoughts in the comments box?
Any of you thinking of providing educational materials for other nurses? Let me know, I can put you in touch with some highly professional educational material packagers and distributors.
Cheers,
Anna
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If you guys like this post, feel free to re-post it on Facebook or Twitter! Let’s make this nurse entrepreneur thing go viral!
Follow me on Twitter @icoachnurses and join the club at my Facebook Fanpage so you never miss out on the latest posts and events info!
Read MoreWhat an awesome video!
Check out the first 2 minutes where this faculty member discusses how franchising a wholly nurse-run Passport Health Clinic was so successful, that 2 local MDs closed their own clinics and became the nurses’ employees!
Start dreaming big, future nurse entrepreneurs!
Are any of you interested in franchising a Passport Health Clinic?
If so, let me know as I can point you in the right direction for funding.
Cheers,
Anna
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If you guys like this post, feel free to re-post it on Facebook or Twitter! Let’s make this nurse entrepreneur thing go viral!
Follow me on Twitter @icoachnurses and join the club at my Facebook Fanpage so you never miss out on the latest posts and events info!
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Student Nurse Makes Video About Becoming a Nurse Entrepreneur!
The kids are dreaming big, Alice!
All I have to say to this video is, “You, Go Girl!”
Watching this student nurse presentation on becoming a nurse entrepreneur makes me so proud and gives me hope that younger nurses are starting to recognize their worth and realize that there is so much inherent value to what they bring to the marketplace!
If she’s planning to make it happen for herself….what are you still waiting for?
Tell me what you think of the video in the comments box.
Cheers,
Anna
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If you guys like this post, feel free to re-post it on Facebook or Twitter! Let’s make this nurse entrepreneur thing go viral!
Follow me on Twitter @icoachnurses and join the club at my Facebook Fanpage so you never miss out on the latest posts and events info!
Read MoreHey Guys!
This article from the UK-based magazine, Nursing Times, hits the nail on the head with the opening question of this article: “How many times have you struggled with a poorly designed piece of equipment, tried to book staff from an agency, or listened to a facilitator and thought: ‘I could do that better’?” This line of thinking is EXACTLY what spurs nurse entrepreneurs into action. But ACTION, not just having the thought, is the key!
Sure there are challenges along the way, but to those who risk comes reward.
Read up on these ambitious nurse entrepreneurs from across the pond and leave me a comment in the box below if you feel inspired!
Warmly,
Anna
by Victoria Hoban, Nursing Times Magazine (UK)
How many times have you struggled with a poorly designed piece of equipment, tried to book staff from an agency, or listened to a facilitator and thought: ‘I could do that better’?
And if you did have this thought, did you do anything about it? An increasing number of nurses are doing just that. By developing their ideas into successful businesses, services, or products, they are carving out new careers for themselves as nurse entrepreneurs.
One such nurse is Barbara Hastings-Asatourian, a former nurse educator and health visitor. ‘I used to run programmes on sex education, where I would speak in front of young people,’ she says.
‘It was embarrassing for them and they would ask very few questions. My intention was not to repeat the experience, so when I had to design my own programme for a group of young people with learning difficulties, I developed a board game so they learn together in small groups.’
Little did she know where her idea would lead. So far her company, Contraception Education Ltd, of which she is managing director, has sold 1,200 copies of Contraception: The Board Game.
Last year she was a finalist in the British Female Inventor of the Year Awards.
Read MoreHey 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
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 MoreNurses have been at the forefront of patient care for a long time. This uniquely positions us within our nursing jobs to ask some of the most vital, creative and high-quality questions in healthcare. And as the great Tony Robbins once said, “Quality questions create a quality life.”
So what does being uniquely positioned to ask good questions mean to the average nurse?
Well, asking the right kind of questions, can lead to some pretty creative thinking about the real-world answers to those questions. And, as many Nurse Entrepreneurs have discovered, answering the most common questions or solving the most common problems in healthcare can not only be a great service to patients, families and healthcare providers, but it can also be a very lucrative endeavor.
Terms such as EntrepreNurse™, Nurse Entrepreneur and Nurse Leader are becoming more common and serve as important new topics for discussion, even though many are not familiar with what these relatively new concepts mean.
What is an EntrepreNurse™or a Nurse Entrepreneur?
