That would be the taste of barf in my throat Nurses Week is fast approaching. I am steeling myself mentally for the steady drizzle of syrupy tributes from various health care apparatchiks and functionaries, who will inevitably make some reference to nurses as “angels” and the “beating heart of health care” or
Continue readingTag: Nurses
Those Emergency Blues: Nurses Grieve Too
An underexplored or ignored aspect of nursing professional life: how nurses working in a Labour and Delivery unit grieve over the loss of their patients, and how this grief affects care and support of survivors. What is really striking about the film is the culture of mutual support and respect
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: How Nurses View Themselves
A selection of “What I Actually Do” meme posters” related to nursing, which have been making the rounds on the Interwebs. Some of them, I guess, are funny and clever, and they’re meant (I suppose) to educate the public at large about the realities of nursing. But what I think
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: What I Have Learned from Nursing
The world of nursing on a couple of dozen flash cards. From The Nursing Channel on YouTube. While I don’t agree necessarily with every card — some of them, I think, play into some old stereotypes on how nurses behave — it’s still a fresh perspective on nursing. What do
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: In Which TorontoEmerg is So Busted, or, Welcome, Jean Hill
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a colleague, whom I will call Jean Hill, and by-the-by the conversation fell to nurse bloggers. Several prominent ones were mentioned, like Crass-Pollination and Emergiblog and Nerdy Nurse. “Oh,” said Jean Hill innocently. “I wish I could write like these guys.” At
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Nurse Love, The Real Kind
Some real nurse love — and incidentally reminding us why we have the most tremendous profession in the world and how we each day make a powerful difference in the lives of our patients. Via the blog The Spohrs are Multiplying, Mike Spohr writes about the day his child died:
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Breastfeeding Makes Sane People Crazy
Why does any discussion of breastfeeding makes people a little insane? I don’t exclude myself: even I get a little agitated. Here are some examples of what I mean: Exhibit A: a recent post on breastfeeding at KevinMD.com sparked a small flame war in the comments. Barbara Bronson, an RN wrote there: A
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Observations and Assessments
NOTIONS TO SMALL FOR A BLOG POST, ALL IN ONE PLACE, A.K.A. THE PERIODIC LINK DUMP. Nursing Related: New (to me) Blog Shoutouts — “This blog hopes to present a different perspective on the Vancouver 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. Here, we’ll try to post letters of those that were working
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: More on When Labelling Patients Causes Patients to Die
In the comments WhiteCoat (of WhiteCoat’s Call Room fame) strenuously objects to my take on the Anna Brown case: Wow. Someone on my blog suggested that I check out this post after I just posted about this story yesterday. To all of you who think “something more should have been
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: On Your Feet, Nurse, the Doctor’s Here!
Should nurses give up their chairs for physicians? A nursing professor named Susan Kieffer writing at NurseTogether.com thinks so: If you have been a nurse for any length of time, you know how precious the seats at the nurses’ station really are. These seats are a rare commodity; one to
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Just Because I Don’t Remember You Doesn’t Mean I Didn’t Care
In the Emergency Department where I work, the number of patients we see pushes 200 some days. We assess and treat a lot of people, mostly for lumps and bumps, breaks and bruises, but also for major, cataclysmic, life-altering events — MIs, trauma, stroke, what-have-you. I have a problem. The
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: A Poem for Easter
My own, with at least Easterish themes of death and rebirth. Originally published on 7/10/10. VSA You came to us, no vital signs, no breath Found dead, or nearly so, by the mall You last saw cars, careening carts, a child. Then falling, hard pavement, blood, a void empty Of
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Easter 2012
Happy Easter. One thing you may or may not know about me, dear readers, is that I’m a retired Catholic. Like many other people, I left because what some Catholics would call “below-the-belt” issues, but also because the (ongoing) sexual abuse scandals, the treatment of women, and the utter hatred
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: When Labelling Patients Causes Patients to Die
I found this story how a homeless woman died very disturbing: Anna Brown wasn’t leaving the emergency room quietly. She yelled from a wheelchair at St. Mary’s Health Center security personnel and Richmond Heights police officers that her legs hurt so badly she couldn’t stand. She had already been to
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Fat Nurses Need Not Apply
A Texas hospital has declared war on the scourge of obese nurses: A Victoria [Texas] hospital already embroiled in a discrimination lawsuit filed by doctors of Indian descent has instituted a highly unusual hiring policy: It bans job applicants from employment for being too overweight. The Citizens Medical Center policy, instituted a
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Scripting Nurses is Bad for Patient Care
This might be a new low in nursing management. Instead of actually providing caring, empathy and compassion, some hospitals would like nurses to provide a simulacrum of caring, empathy and compassion, believing patients are stupid enough not to tell the difference: Nurses unions say an increasing number of hospitals nationwide are asking
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Nursing Makes Nurses Less Empathetic
Irony alert! The best way to decrease empathy in nurses, apparently, is to actually practice nursing. A new study of nursing students found that as students gained more clinical exposure, they demonstrated a much greater decline in empathy scores over the year than did those with limited clinical experience during
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: The National Concerns of Busting Unions & Health Care
Marking a complete reversal by the Conservatives in intergovernmental relations, on Friday the process of creating a new health agreement between the federal government and the provinces will be announced. This will be a dramatic change from the Conservatives’ position on health care made just months earlier when Finance Minister
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: The Guy in the Next Bed
Code Blue on the floor: a lot like a Code Blue in the Emergency Department, except we have to run to the elevators, take a ponderously slow ride up to whatever floor they’re doing compressions, and then run some more down some endlessly long corridors till we find a room
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Portraits of Nurses at War
A small selection of photographs from the National Archives of Canada. Nurses have served with the Canadian military since Northwest Rebellion in 1885 and small contingents were sent to the South African War — the Boer War — at the turn of the last century. Nurses became an official part of
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