Pursuing your B.S.N., M.S.N., or doctorate is an exciting journey, but starting down that path can also be a little scary, especially if you’re adding it to a busy work/life schedule. But many nurses do so every year, and the consensus is that anyone can—so long as they try! Here, we explore some of the implications of going back to school and how these real-world nurses made it work.
Nurses contribute to health care in the United States every day. But the country's focus on health care reform gives nurse practitioners an opportunity to make an even greater impact
Hypertension is a serious health problem affecting African Americans more frequently than other ethnic groups. Here, one nurse observes the reasoning behind patients' antihypertensive medication noncompliance and how to properly educate them.
Nursing requires clinical skills, of course, but there are other more intrinsic abilities all nurses (should) possess. Can these intangibles be taught? One nursing professor takes a philosophical, even poetic, look at infusing nursing education with the virtues of the profession.
What’s the status of diversity and discrimination in nursing today? One Doctor of Education student turned her focus on research in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, to analyze how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go
In 1996, two game-changing pieces of healthcare legislation had the attention of the industry. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was being enacted, and the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) was being debated. Nurse leaders crowded into public hearing rooms to try to understand the potential ramifications of HIPAA and to protest the challenges they foresaw if the BBA’s provisions were enacted. Many nurses watched in dismay, feeling like victims of federal policymaking engines. Some tried to learn more about political action in an effort to save their businesses and help their patients. Out of that experience, and others that followed, political activism started growing among nurses...
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States both for men and women,
killing 25% of Americans, and heart disease deaths are most often due to ischemic heart
disease (e.g., heart attack).1 These facts are well known among doctors, nurses, and other...
For all the miraculous work nurses do as caretakers, they are notorious for neglecting the very things in their own lives they know are important, such as physical or financial health. But ignoring either one can have serious consequences.
Who are you? Well, you are a medical-surgical (med-surg) nurse, of course. You are a member of a very talented and competent nursing specialty. Let’s delve into this in more detail...
When Rhys Gibson, RN, received his nursing degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009, the recession had started and it took him eight months to land a job. “I thought I was the cat’s meow...
Feeling overwhelmed? Heavy patient load, blazing speed, 24/7 shifts, and an ever-evolving field have long been complaints among nursing professionals. Add the stress of a slumping economy, budget cuts, and staff re-jiggering, and job fatigue can hit critical mass in the workplace.
By now, most of us within the health care sector have already become well-acquainted with the impending and grim statistics facing the United States, mainly in regards to the staggering dearth in our nursing profession purportedly by the year 2014...
What an exciting opportunity to be invited to teach in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program at St. George’s University in Grenada, West Indies...
In 2008, there were 3,063,163 licensed registered nurses in the United States. Only 6.6% of those were men and 16.8% were non-Caucasian.1 Despite efforts from nursing schools across the nation to recruit and retain more men and minorities, the results have been fairly modest...
The nursing profession has always been an advocate for providing community assessment, education, and health screenings to the public to promote healthier communities...
The women trickle in, one by one, into a brightly lit ground floor conference room at Providence Hospital, a large urban hospital in Washington, DC. A vibrant social worker greets each one as “honey” as they take their seats in a circle of chairs. Each is...
