A conversation with
Sandra Edwardson
Sandra Edwardson, 2005 Senior Nurse Scholar in Residence
at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), talks
about her research experience at the AHRQ, PhD training for nurses
and the newly proposed doctor of nursing practice degree.
Nurses need rest, too!
Trying to solve the nursing shortage all by your self?
Trying to do it all by going 100 miles per hour, 24/7? It won’t
work. “No matter how invincible we think we are,”
writes the author, “sooner or later we all need to ‘step
away from the plate,’ as they say in baseball, and rest.”
Border crossings
While political debate rages in the United States about
how to secure its southern border from illegal immigration, a
U.S. nursing school and a nursing school in Mexico are collaborating
to promote better health care while improving cross-cultural awareness.
Are you the best leader
you can be?
Susan Hassmiller, senior program officer and nursing
team leader at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, challenges
nurses to hone their leadership skills to a higher level and provides
ideas on how to get started.
Joy-stealing games
The author asked 1,400 nurse educators to describe times
when a colleague, administrator or subordinate said or did something
that left them feeling disrespected, devalued or dismissed, and
received 261 stories of academic games that one described as “joy-stealing.”
Many strategies can be used in playing the joy-stealing game,
but the object is the same: Rob your co-worker of joy and job
satisfaction while advancing your own agenda. There’s no
limit to the number of players.
Promoting evidence-based practice
through collaborative partnerships
Bernadette Melnyk and Ellen Fineout-Overholt, co-authors
of Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing & Healthcare, report
on the launching of the United States’ first statewide consortium
in evidence-based practice.
Putting nurses in the driver’s
seat
Most nurses became nurses so they could care for patients,
but studies show they spend less than half of their work time
delivering direct patient care. Transforming Care at the Bedside,
a collaborative effort by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and 13 hospitals across the
United States, is out to change that, and is enlisting nurses
to help make its case.
Found in translation
How do you say fever and rash in Lusaka, Zambia? If
you don’t know Chinyanja, it’s best to have a translator.
But one thing five U.S. nurses from Kentucky found that they did
have in common with the women of Zambia was a concern for good
health.
She knew how to take care of
fish, but what about human patients?
With a doctoral degree in fish genetics and reproductive
biology, Mary Ann Abiado was well prepared to “take care
of fish, spawn them, rear their eggs and young, draw blood, perform
feeding studies and collect tissue samples,” but could she
do a good job caring for older people? Now pursuing a nursing
degree, Abiado describes some of what she learned and observed
during 18 days of clinical training in a nursing home.
Meeting my neighbors on the
other side of the Atlantic
Who is your neighbor? Anyone who needs your help. D’Ann
Van Lente, a nurse from the United States, met some of her neighbors
in Nigeria while providing immunizations against polio.
