- 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.
If you don’t know who embattled Nurse Amanda Trujillo is, well, you’ve probably been living under a rock, or maybe you just worked 3 in a row…in either case, you’re forgiven.
Before you listen to her audio interview though, check out my 2 previous posts about her dire situation here and here.
Once you understand her case, you’ll also understand it’s far-reaching implications for the Nursing profession and a patient’s right to informed consent and right to determine the course of their own care.
Let that all sink in for a bit and then listen to Amanda explain her case in her own words in this very special interview:
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.
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.
Wow! 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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PBS Reports: “Surge of Young Nurses Could Help Reverse Shortage”
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?
Check out this link to a video on YouTube showing an Australian nurse who was sick of running back and forth to grab all her supplies all the time. She just wanted to have everything handy and save herself all the walking, so she invented a type of Nursing Toolbelt called the “Nurses’ Joey” and it’s taking off like wildfire!
I love it’s simplicity and functionality!
Check out the video and let me know what you think?
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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!
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.
In this post, I just want to open up a little and allow you to get to know me better. I don’t want to be just another blogger hiding behind a website or just another “gooroo” whom you never really get to know.
I’ve learned that business is just like life, whether it’s online or off it’s ALL about one thing: RELATIONSHIPS!
And I want you guys to know that I’m here to help you out in any way I can, but in addition to that, I really just want to connect and build a relationship with you. Hopefully, out of those relationships, together we can build a fun, caring and supportive community.
So below you will find a few things you may not know about me. Really, I just want to pull back the curtain and let you know what I’m about.
1. I was born and raised in sunny Miami, FL and was the only “gringa” in my entire class the whole way through elementary school. Needless to say, I learned Spanglish fast and can now hold my own.
2. I’m a Gen X-er. I was born on August 26, 1975. (The same date in history that the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed, giving women the right to vote.) I guess they knew I was coming!
3. “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” is my all-time favorite movie, and I can recite every line from it that’s worth reciting.
4. I’m starting to go gray and I can’t decide whether I want to run away and bury my head in the sand and cry, or suck it up, hold my graying head up high and pretend it looks distinguished.
5. I have a birthmark on the inside of my left thigh; it looks like a rocket ship.
I have fun playing Texas Hold ‘Em with friends. Did you know that playing the game or watching shows like World Tour of Poker can help you succeed in business?
I didn’t realize that while I was learning to play, I was gaining valuable business skills that have translated into money in my pocket. (And no, I don’t mean by gambling).
Let me explain. I learned the four following things from playing poker.
First, I learned how to make the best of the cards I was dealt.
I learned when to play a hand, when to take risks, and when to throw the cards away and wait to act with better ones. This kind of discernment helps a business owner make sound decisions about working with assets and when to cut a project loose if it’s not producing good results.
I found that when starting your own business, you will invest 2 assets—your time and your money. Depending on where you start, you’ll use one of these assets more than the other. A realistic understanding of which asset you’re working from can help you make the most of what you’ve got.
The second lesson I learned from poker is that you’ve got to use a strategy to win.
Good players spend years learning from each other and developing a strategy that’s right for them. Their strategy is reliable and flexible enough to adapt to new situations.
They learn something new from each game, and they actively look for the lessons when they lose a hand. They know how much they’re willing to bet in an evening, and they aren’t pushed off course by setbacks because their strategy takes the slow time into account.
