Nursing Journal of Nursing
Transitioning to Nursing: Making the Leap from One Career to Another
Tags: career career guidance nursing profession professional rn transition transitioning
Switching careers can be a daunting but incredibly rewarding decision, especially when moving into the field of nursing. Whether you're coming from a completely different profession or a related field, the transition to nursing requires careful planning, dedication, and a passion for helping others. This article explores the challenges and rewards of leaving one career to pursue nursing and offers practical advice to help you navigate this significant change.
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Nursing and a Broken System
Tags: career guidance healthcare system healthcare workers nursing staffing shortages
The impact of the current healthcare system on nursing
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Who Will Be Left to Care for You?
Tags: acute care care coronavirus COVID-19 healthcare workers nurse workload nursing Pandemic
It is sadly too late to help many our front line healthcare workers who have contracted the deadly COVID-19 virus. We need to find a way to help the rest NOW in order to save their lives and in turn they can save your life.
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Love hate relationship in nursing
Tags: appreciation hate love love-hate nursing
My experience from a person who hated nursing to emerging as a qualified nurse.
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Nurses Eat Their Young; An Insight Into Systematic Hazing and its Implications on Patient Care
Tags: bullying hazing nursing nursing students patient care stress student nurse
I am a nursing student that worked as a CNA for six years. I was inspired to write this from my own experiences that I have encountered while working in the field of nursing.
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Managing the Inevitability of Change
Tags: Case Study change Change in the workplace closing of a unit emotional impact of change emotions employee satisfaction hospital nursing
Change is inevitable. Whether we are changing our minds, our clothes, or a channel on television, we know change happens… and we are fine with it, when we are the ones enacting it. However, what about when change happens to us? This article explores the effects of a hospital’s unit closing on staff – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and seeks to identify ways to mitigate the bad and ugly emotional responses, and hopefully explore means of increasing the good (by both hospital management practice, and individual mindset). A unit in one of south Florida leading hospital serves as a case study as we delve into this topic.
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Post-Fall Care Nursing Algorithm
Tags: clinical Clinical Education fall care fall prevention falls nursing
Post-Fall care practices are an integral aspect to patient care. As we care for older adults it is important to consider post-fall care practices.
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Attitude Matters: Attitudes and Values in Nursing
Tags: attitude attitudes and values in nursing behavior conflict resolution nursing nursing attitudes values
Even with a shared set of values and behaviors, we cannot underestimate the nurse’s attitude towards: others, their patients, their co-workers, and the organization they work for and towards the profession of nursing.
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Beginnings of a Lifetime
Tags: career calling inspiration nursing
Inspirational article about becoming a nurse and 38 years later.
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Improving Patient Care While Decreasing Costs: The Benefits, Barriers, and Student Perspectives on Nurse Residency Programs
Tags: decreasing costs Floating graduates improving patient care new graduate nurses nursing nursing school nursing students patient care student perspectives violence
Many professions have long since realized that a vast divide exists between the classroom and real-world practice and, thus, have mandated transitional programs. Nursing lacks such an intermediate step as part of its professional training although new nurses are pressured to provide both safe and competent care to increasingly complex patients without any transitional support. To fill this gap many institutions have begun to implement their own nurse-residency programs [NRPs]. However, since not all institutions have introduced such transition-into-practice programs barriers must exist. Nationwide, NRPs are shrouded in confusion, false perceptions, and concerns that hinder their implementation. This manuscript was compiled to help shed light onto the reasons for the lack of implementation and provides evidence of the importance and overall benefits for such programs. Personal perspectives are also provided from the authors in order to gain a nursing-student perspective about these transitional programs.
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Successful Aging For Canada's LGBT Older Adults
Tags: aging caregiver discrimination gay health care professionals lesbian LGBT LGBTQ mental health nursing older adults transgender
A research paper I wrote for my BSN degree regarding how health care services, particularly nursing can accommodate older adult members of the LGBT community and provide safe and best practice care.
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Reflections of Nurse Educator
Tags: assertiveness Nurse Educator nursing teaching
Teaching is an art. Some people are born teachers while others acquire the skill. To be a great teacher, one has to have a sense of humor and be very flexible. Teachers will never teach to gain monetary reward. However, they will teach to achieve the best reward - satisfaction that they have an impact on the education of the leaders of the world, the training of CEOs, and the success of new breed of professionals. Teaching is a noble profession.
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Is Nursing a Profession?
Tags: advanced education advanced practice culture debate ethical principles ethical standards ethical values ethics nursing nursing ethics profession RN to BSN
Professions require that educational preparedness must be within institutions of higher learning. In order to be held out as a profession, an individual must be able to practice autonomously within their scope of practice. Nurses have an identified scope of practice mandated by a particular state board of nursing. A profession has a code of ethics which is recognized across numerous levels of practice within the profession. The culture and norms of a profession are easily recognized by the professionals who make-up the body.
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History of Ebola and Nursing
Tags: ebola history of ebola nursing
Many healthcare providers and the public are paying very special attention to the outbreak of the Ebola Virus in West Africa and the subsequent infection of the two critical care nurses at Texas. Many healthcare professionals expressed their confusion about the virus and the seeming stigmatization of nurses. Currently with the outbreak in Texas, nurses and other healthcare providers were encountered the same dilemmas as Central Africa nurses years ago.
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Bearers of Light - A Poem
A poem about nurses. The bearers of light in the darkness of patients' lives.
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Receiving another patient helped save my other patient...
Tags: elderly experiences nursing nursing experiences PACU
I started my day in the Post Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU). I work the 7a-7p shift. It was just another routine day. I received an 84yr old female patient Mrs. R from the Main Operating Room (OR) who had undergone a Left Shoulder Replacement. Mrs. R received an interscalene block for pain in the OR and had general anesthesia. Since she was elderly and was not having good tidal volumes at the end of the case anesthesia decided to keep her on the ventilator a bit longer until she woke up more...
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The Hospital Room: Not Just Four Walls
Tags: hospital room nursing nursing faculty nursing students patient room
The patient room is a place where patients and families learn about an illness and treatment plan, and where patients get better or worse. It is very important for nurses/nursing students to get a sense of the emotion that goes on in these rooms, the room is more than four walls.
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The Cardiac Diagnostic Interventional Symposium (CDIS)
Tags: allied healthcare professional education better world cardiac Cardiac Diagnostic children heathier children Hospital for Sick Children nursing SickKids team building
The symposium focused on nursing and allied healthcare professional education.
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A Thank You to Nurses
Tags: nursing opinion articles thank you
A brief look into the daily trials and joys of the intensive care unit.
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Care of the Pediatric Patient
Tags: care nursing pediatric pediatric patients The Flu
Short exemplar about caring for a pediatric patient in Interventional Radiology
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Do We Really Know Who Our Patients Are?
Tags: caring connecting with patients fundamendals nursing patient identification pilot study task oriented who is our patient
The profession of nursing has become so task orientated that we often forget to ask, "Who is our patient? ”What was their life like prior to becoming ill?" With advances in technology and the business atmosphere of healthcare nurses are often not able to provide patients with one of the most fundamental core competencies of nursing, caring.
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Be the Nurse you REALLY Want to Be
Tags: motivation nursing
When asked for my advice I encourage them to be brave, take risks and aggressively pursue your professional dreams. Too many new nurses say they won’t apply to the specialty the long for because they don’t thing they have enough experience. I really feel like this is highly self-limiting. In this field the knowledge and experience never ends. You won’t get every job you want but you have nothing to lose by trying. If your dream is to become a trauma nurse and you work in a nursing home it’s time to take action. Nurses generally know far more than they give themselves credit for. Begin to really evaluate your skills and give yourself credit for what you know the experiences you have, and don’t forget about the non-nursing experiences as well.
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National Nursing Licensure
Tags: health nurse licensure nurse shortage nursing
National nursing licensure promotes more effective licensing than does state licensure by alleviating the ever-present nursing shortage and promoting mobility among the nursing workforce.
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Professional Nursing: Is A Doctorate Degree Necessary?
Tags: degrees educational requirements ethics health nursing nursing education requirements
Obtaining a higher education has transitioned from being a privilege to a prerequisite for professional success. However, success is not always correlated with the level of education the individual possesses. This is especially true in the field of nursing.
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Moral Distress in Nursing and Available Support Systems
Tags: ethics health moral disress nursing support systems
Moral distress is a key issue facing nursing today; it affects the way nurses care for their patients and the number of nurses who stay in the profession (Gutierrez, 2005; Hamric & Blackhall, 2007).
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The Reality of Diabetes in Rural Mexico: A Nursing Student Perspective
Tags: diabetes mexico nursing perspective student students
Students from six universities in Canada, Mexico, and the USA participated in a service learning exchange. In order to understand the needs of diabetes patients in rural Mexico three students from Canada and the USA trudged in the heat through the rough terrain to their homes. We used Omaha System signs/symptoms to collect interview data. The standardized language of the questionnaire allowed us to be aware of the interaction between traditional medical beliefs and the western medical model. Some of these challenges include maintaining the traditional family roles, controlling blood glucose levels without the appropriate medical equipment, and economic barriers. One patient was responsible for both caring for her eight young children and working in the fields to put food on the table. Additionally, she was in a constant hypoglycemic state causing her to faint in the fields. We also visited a visually impaired man that was distraught because he needed to rely on others for help in a machismo society. He said “While living in New York City, I was a victim of a robbery. I was so afraid because I thought I was going to die and as a result I got diabetes.” Though some may find this comment strange, it is a common theory among the rural population in Mexico. We will always remember the many Mexican speculate that eating bread absorbs the scare and thus prevents diabetes. This experience gave us a glimpse of the harsh reality that these people face everyday coping with diabetes.
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The Blessing: A Nurse’s Story
Tags: blessing compassion family nursing stroke
It was nine o’clock pm and I was walking briskly out of Recovery Room, knowing I had to be back the next day at six am. Though in a hurry, I purveyed the family waiting room to see if there were any visitors who needed help after the patient representative had gone home. I immediately noticed a lone woman with an anxious look on her face. As it turned out, her daughter-in-law had just been transferred to Intensive Care. Instead of waiting for one of our transporters, I decided to take her up myself. As we headed down the hall, she stated: “I bet you’re trying to leave, aren’t you?” I affirmed her observation. I added that, it was quite all right. We arrived at the particular ICU where her daughter-in-law was transferred, and upon talking with the patient’s RN, I was able to let her in right away. She turned to me and said: “Thank you; you will be blessed.”
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A Needed Change in Nursing
Tags: change licensure nurse licensure nurse shortage nursing nursing shortage
National nursing licensure promotes more effective licensing than does state licensure by alleviating the ever-present nursing shortage and promoting mobility among the nursing workforce. Some of the many benefits of a national nursing licensure include improved patient access to quality nursing care, enhanced discipline and information sharing among the states, physical and electronic provision of care by competent nurses, and convenience of employers to more mobile and competent nurses.
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American Association of Critical-Care Nurses Brings its National Nurse Leadership Skill-building Program to Texas
Tags: aacn American Association of Critical-Care Nurses critical care innovation training program leadership skills nursing skill-building
The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) expands its hospital-based nurse leadership and innovation training program to a fourth region with the addition of eight Austin-area hospitals. AACN Clinical Scene Investigator (CSI) Academy is designed to empower bedside nurses as clinician leaders and change agents whose initiatives measurably improve the quality of patient care with bottom-line impact to the hospital.
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Challenges in Nursing Informatics
Tags: charting checklists computerized charting flow sheets health care healthcare system informatics nursing technology
As the use of technology explodes into the health care industry, its effects have the potential to become destructive elements to the nursing profession. This paper will discuss the evolution of nursing documentation, the immergence of health information technology, and the challenges it creates for the nursing profession.
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Change for the Best
Tags: changes health care history of nursing new school practices nursing uniforms
There have been many changes in nursing in the almost thirty years since I graduated.
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Conducting Nursing Research
Tags: medical technology nursing research
Evidence-based research by nursing professionals has played a major role in the advances of medical technology.
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Conflict Resolution
Tags: aging assertiveness conflict resolution nursing RN team building tools
Conflict Resolution Tools For Nursing in the RN Journal
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Culturally Competent Nursing in Homecare
Tags: caregiver culture health care homecare nursing
Homecare nurses must be culturally aware in order to appropriately care for homecare patients. Culture plays a part in the care of all types of patients but it plays a more important role in homecare. The care is being completed in the home where the patient controls the care. The nurse has to assess the cultural background of the patient in order to implement an appropriate plan of care.
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Is There Care In Health Care - A Poem
Tags: assisting family health care nursing poem
I wrote this poem after going out one day to assist a mother with her 22 year old son who had a traumatic brain injury in a 4-wheeler accident. He had a trach, feeding tube, foley cath and skin breakdown from being in a long term care facility for 2 months. The insurance company allowed me three visits to teach the mother how to care for her son.
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Looks Can Be Deceiving
Tags: bowel perforation health care jp drains nursing
I asked his family to step out for a moment so I could empty his JP drains. I emptied them into a basin and I noticed that they were very dark. I inspected them a little closer and I noticed it had a greenish tinge to it. Remembering what the surgeon had said about the possibility of a bowel perforation I got concerned and called the surgeon.
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My Nursing Career A Whole New Appreciation
Tags: appreciation cardiac career love night shift nursing
Not a day goes by, without reading in the newspaper and hearing over the radio or TV about the rising rate of unemployment in our country. It is this reality that has given me a whole new appreciation for being a nurse.
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Mythology
Tags: health mythology nursing nursing students rn student
Article pertaining to mythology as related to nursing and the RN student.
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Nursing Summer Camp: Recruiting the Next Generation of Nurses!
Tags: camp care child children nursing nursing school team building
This manuscript looks at providing a nursing summer camp to school aged children with the hopes of sparking interest in the profession at a young age, as well as fostering the nursing spirit in children who may be considering the profession.
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Nursing with a Movement Disorder... DYSTONIA
Tags: care dystonia ICU Nurse movment disorder nursing
Oddly enough, my professional journey through medicine intersected with a personal medical condition… one that would remain undiagnosed and untreated for five years. Some doctors said that my facial tics (hemifacial spasms) and strange pains with twisting of limbs were due to stress or some hysterical "woman's disease." Yes, we're talking this century.
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Providing Appropriate Nursing Care for the Developmentally Disabled Child
Tags: autism care child children disabled health nursing
Developmental disabilities are birth defects related to a problem with how body parts and/or body systems work. These defects may affect multiple body parts and/or systems. There are four types of disability discussed in this article including nervous system disability, sensory-related disability, metabolic disorders and degenerative disorders.
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The new meaning of the word “STAT”
The word “STAT” and what it means to me compared to what it means to others. In this instance it was sort of a “Hurry up and wait” affair.
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UN Noticed
Tags: assistant degrees hero knowledge nursing nursing assistant RN
It takes more than the knowledge of degrees can provide. It takes the UN noticed hero, our nursing assistant.
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Can I Depend On You?
Tags: care health nursing students
An LPN Instructor at East Central Technical College in Douglas, Georgia requires an experience for her nursing students.
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Nursing Students Readying to Save Lives
Tags: active learning care health myocardial infarction nursing patient outcomes simulation students teaching
Recognizing the findings in a patient with an impending myocardial infarction (MI) and intervening appropriately is essential for healthcare providers in improving patient outcomes.
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