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Despite the fact that the American public consistently ranks nurses as among the top five most trustworthy types of people, nursing is one of the least-understood professions. Very few people really understand exactly who we are, what we do, or how much we have to learn in order to do it. My friend “Strong One” [...]

Bravo to Phil Baumann, RN, for his blog post, An Open Letter to Some Nursing Education Faculty. To his list, I would also like to add “Appreciate your students’ previous knowledge and life experience.”
As someone who attended nursing school after a successful career in the tech industry, it was disconcerting to be expected to [...]

The elderly black woman’s blood pressure had been dangerously elevated. While I was checking her vitals for one of many times that shift, she looked up at me hesitantly. “If I tell you something, will you do it for me?” she asked. “What is it?” I replied. “Go out yonder,” she said, pointing at the [...]

An ambulance technician in Scotland, in his post Fat Chance, has finally (and beautifully) put into words some of the frustration I’ve felt so many times when working with obese patients:
Morbid obesity is dangerous, hence the moniker, but in the emergency situation it’s not the ischaemic heart disease that causes the problems, nor the diabetes, [...]

There are cameras in the patient rooms on our psych units. The images they produce are tiny, black and white, and grainy. (That’s not really by design; they’re just very old, and they aren’t broken, so there’s no reason to replace them.) They don’t show much detail — just enough to allow us to keep [...]

We were getting a new patient on the psych unit. This person had been picked up by the police with no ID, psychotic and mute. We were informed we couldn’t admit them as J___ Doe, which was the name the police had given them, because that would reveal their gender, thereby violating their privacy. The [...]

There’s always a pause in the activities in the nurse’s station when the anonymous voice comes over the loudspeaker urgently summoning the “rapid response team” to a patient’s room. Somewhere in the hospital, a nurse has sensed that a patient has taken a turn for the worse, and has called for help.
Our pulses quicken [...]