• How Mindfulness Can Be an Act of Self-Care for Nurses

    Originally posted on Nightingale: Nurse Burnout Won’t go Away Until the Industry Changes. But in the Meantime, Mindfulness can Help Nurses Prioritize Their Well-Being. ? This past November I attended a workshop on nurse burnout at the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin. Clinical nurses, administrators, and researchers came together for three days to…

  • The National Institutes of Health Disappoints

    When I worked at the National Institutes of Health, a colleague and I wrote an article: The Role of Nurse Practitioners Expands at NIH for the NIH Record newsletter in May of 2000 about the increase of Nurse Practitioners at the Institute. My short time there was exciting, especially as I witnessed NP positions increase…

  • Mindfulness: Julia Sarazine

    I met Julia Sarazine this past June when I spoke to Rush University nurses in Chicago about my book: Stories from the Tenth-Floor Clinic: A Nurse Practitioner Remembers. We agreed on the need for nurses to tell their stories. When I discovered Julia’s background in teaching mindfulness techniques to nurses in order to reduce symptoms…

  •  Change of Pace: Panzanella

    The high temperatures that we have in Raleigh keep me indoors more that I would like. The thermometer on my kitchen counter tells me it’s 99 degrees outside as I write this at 4 pm. Our home is comfortably cool so I could just knuckle down and write my weekly post that is due tomorrow.…

  • Home Visits Can Be Fraught with Danger

      One time, long ago, at a nursing conference, I sat fixated as a fellow nurse told a story about the time she rang the doorbell at her patient’s house, and he didn’t answer. It was later that she found out he had been murdered. And in hearing more detail, she discovered that the murderer…

  • Murder Building

    I am reviewing posts that I will consider for inclusion in my second book, which focuses on home visits I have made in Chicago, Washington DC, and Durham, NC. I came upon Murder Building that was originally posted on February 19, 2012. It’s a keeper. When I visited a patient in my caseload that lived…