Related: Bureaucracy, Patient Advocate, Professionalism

Love the current proposal or hate it, it's hard to deny that this country needs health care reform.  And as a nurse married to a small business owner, I am certainly interested--and invested--in the topic.

As health care professionals, we have a first row seat to the drama as it unfolds.  We know the stories of patients who have insufficient or no coverage.  Who have not [...]

Related: Attitude, Boundaries, Caregivers, Caring, Charting, Expectations, Patient Advocate, Patients

Rooming patients, giving injections, charting, answering the phone, taking messages.  These are all listed in my job description with a whole list of other normal office nursing kinds of things. 

Not listed, but also expected: picking up paperclips from the floor, trying to keep my piles neat, and telling someone when the Kleenex are running low.  And really, truth be told, I probably spend as [...]

The New Zealand health system isn't immune, and I bet the States isn't either, or the Australian. You see, we've all got something in common. We've either got an indigenous people, or at the very least a group of people who migrated to our respective countries before us white people did. This means you probably have a racist healthcare system. At least that's what the [...]

Related: Attitude, Caregiving, Caring, Patient Advocate

I work in a relatively small ER: 24 beds including hall beds. I am a newcomer to this area, and almost everyone has experience in emergency medicine (in one capacity or another) for much longer than I have. Perhaps this is partly why I interact with patients the way I do, as opposed to the way I see many other nurses do.

From my observations, [...]

Related: Caregiving, Compassion, Confidence, Emotions, Failure, Fear, Feelings, Patient Advocate, Problem Solving

I spent last week as a camp nurse in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  For the most part, I spent my days giving kids their meds, removing splinters, putting band-aids on scrapes, and generally being a mom.  It didn't take as much skill as a ready smile and encouraging word.

Then Wednesday night hit.  It was the beginning of a 24-hour period that had my adrenaline [...]

Related: Caregivers; Patient Advocate, Caregiving, Confidentiality, Perception of Nurses

I recently watched Fox News for the first time. I was disgusted by how biased and uninformed their reporting was. Here's the scenario, it painted all nurses in a bad light.

A 14-year-old girl rings up an abortion clinic and says she wants an abortion. She lets slip that her partner is 30 years old. The girl asks the nurse, "Will you tell my parents?" The [...]

Related: Communication, Conflict, Doctor-Nurse Relationships, Fear, Feelings, Truth

I hate conflict!  Doesn't matter who it's with or what the reason is, I just hate it.  It makes me uncomfortable and leaves me feeling agitated.  I tend to be more of a "flight" than "fight" kind of gal.

The thing is, conflict is a part of life. So we all have to learn how to deal with it.  It happens at home, at work, even [...]

Related: Boundaries, Bureaucracy, Management, Patient Advocate, Patients

A nurse never wants to face a HIPAA violation.

I've never experienced the ramifications of such a violation personally, but I have seen the aftermath when others have been suspected.

Often the violation stems from one of man's greatest assets: curiosity.  We're geared for acquiring knowledge; yet some things we might be better off being unaware of completely.

Once on the unit I was working, a staff [...]

Related: Attitude, Caregivers, Doctor-Nurse Relationships, Perfect Nurse, Respect, Stereotypes

Nurse Jackie.

Love her or hate her, she certainly has generated some strong comments from our readers.  The general consensus was that the TV show, which depicts the life of a nurse, is unrealistic.  Some find it offensive, some find it funny.

We could argue the rights and wrongs of this particular show for days, but here's what I would like to know.  How would a good [...]

Related: Balance, Feelings, Job Search, Nursing Jobs, Service Nursing

After being laid-off twice since graduating last year, I finally got a job offer as an Acute Care Traveling Apheresis RN (I'll cover 74 hosp in a 75-mile radius). This job sounds awesome--lots of autonomy; I won't be stuck in one place for 8+ hours, 1:1 patient contact; cutting-edge technology in a highly specialized field (which will soon boom b/c of the stem cell stuff [...]