I am grateful to Joost van Beek from NurseRecruiter.com for selecting my blog, NursingStories.org, to be included in the Top Nurse Blogs for 2019, and for including a reference to my memoir: Stories from the Tenth-Floor Clinic: A Nurse Practitioner Remembers. I am so impressed with how many of my fellow … Continue reading Top Nurse Blogs 2019
Category: Nursing
Can nurses really speak out too much?
This article caught my attention from the Nursing Times (a monthly magazine for the nurses of the United Kingdom). I had to do some homework to learn about The Queen’s Nursing Institute and its function. Healthcare policy is a key activity for The Queen’s Nursing Institute. The QNI works to influence decision makers across England, … Continue reading Can nurses really speak out too much?
Nurses Give Their Expert Advice on Understanding the Broken Health Care System
I have been on the lecture circuit. My topic is Empowering the Patient: How to Navigate the Health Care System. Two presentations down and two to go with another in the negotiating stage. I’m fine-tuning the presentation based on the feedback I have received from my audience each time I give the talk. Sana Goldberg’s … Continue reading Nurses Give Their Expert Advice on Understanding the Broken Health Care System
A Nurse Tells it Like it Is
A nurse has called attention to our dysfunctional health care system in the OP-ED section of the New York Times. (Our Jury-Rigged Health Care System by Teresa Brown, New York Times, September 6, 2019) Brown has hit a nerve as evidenced by the 969 comments to date supporting her stance. Her article discusses how nurses (and … Continue reading A Nurse Tells it Like it Is
How Mindfulness Can Be an Act of Self-Care for Nurses
I recently came across a new, to me, Blog: Nightingale. A 2017 post by Teresa Brown describes her initial exposure and reservations about mindfulness—I am not giving away the ending. Given I had just spotlighted Julia Sarazine, a qualified mindfulness instructor, I decided to reblog Teresa’s essay.
The Nightingale website looks interesting and promising, however, I didn’t notice any recent activity. Sara Goldberg, founder of Nightingale, may have been busy with her new book: How to be a Patient: The Essential Guide to Navigating the World of Modern Medicine, which was recently released. I read her book and will review it in a future post.
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 discuss this pressing issue that is epidemic in nursing. One survey found that almost half of nurses are burned out, meaning they’re so overwhelmed by the job that they’ve lost the capacity to really care about it or their patients.
I tend to be suspicious of talk about mindfulness in health care because it seems to place the onus for change on individuals instead of the overall system.
Several of the workshop presenters discussed “Mindfulness” as a way to alleviate burnout. I tend to be suspicious of talk about mindfulness in health care because it seems to place the onus…
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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 … Continue reading The National Institutes of Health Disappoints
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. … Continue reading Change of Pace: Panzanella
New Nursing Show on Netflix
I intend to watch this show. Sounds fascinating. Reblogged from Truth About Nursing: Tiempos de AmTor Netflix show provides limited glimpse of 1920s Spanish wartime nursing, but it does offer one fearless nursing leader January 2018 – This month Netflix released to the U.S. market the first season of Morocco: Love in Times of War, a … Continue reading New Nursing Show on Netflix
We Agers Are Experts On Our Own Aging Experience
A fellow nurse clued me into Doris Carnevali’s blog. Here is what a Seattle news station, K5News, wrote about her. Her blog follows.
A retired nurse is helping explain what happens when we grow old. Some of it might surprise you.
Author: Ted Land
Published: 7:10 PM PDT June 5, 2019
Updated: 7:25 PM PDT June 5, 2019
SEATTLE — A 97-year-old blogger is helping explain what happens when we grow old. Some of it might surprise you.
Each morning, Doris Carnevali sits at a desk in her West Seattle home and starts writing.
“The ideas are bubbling in my head between the time I’m asleep and awake,” she said.
She has plenty to say about what it’s like to age and she’s sharing it all on her blog, Engaging With Aging.
“Sure, there are times when I am down, and the 14th thing I drop in a day makes me frustrated as all get out. But on the whole, it is so much more exciting than I ever thought it was going to be,” Carnevali said.
She is retired from the UW School of Nursing and has written medical textbooks. Then at the age of 95, she picked up a new hobby: blogging.
“I had been ranting about the fact that I thought aging had gotten a rotten deal. That it was much more pleasant, exciting, and challenging than I had been led to believe,” she said.
After hearing that rant, the dean of the UW School of Nursing urged her to publish her thoughts. So Carnevali’s granddaughter created a blog account and the words flowed.
Today, she’s written dozens of passages on what she calls age-related changes.
“My hands don’t pick up things the way I used to, do I say I’m losing my hands? No, I’m changing how I use them and that way I don’t get down in the dumps,” Carnevali said.
Engaging With Aging isn’t a how-to advice blog. It’s more of a diary about what she’s going through. If her readers extract lessons, great. If not, the exercise keeps Carnevali sharp.
“I’m still growing, I’m green, I’m inept, I’m clumsy, I’m learning every day, but I’m green, and I’m growing,” she said. “I thought of aging as being grey, no, it’s green.”
She does not shy away from the fact that there will come a day when her hobby is no longer possible.
“When it happens, it happens, and it would be nice if it didn’t, but I’m too busy doing other things to worry about it right now,” she said.
With that expertise come responsibilities
Many of the people who study old people, theorize and write about us, take care of us, or relate to us are not “old’ themselves. They experience old age second handedly. Earlier in my life as a nurse I often had older patients. As a daughter I shared my parents’ aging. In my 50’s I blithely participated in three editions of a nursing book about caring for the elderly without taking note of myself as the “outsider.”
Now I feel as If I had been a pilot flying over the city of aging, assuming I knew how the residents lived. What an illusion! It’s not that what I knew, used or wrote about elderly people was inaccurate. But it paid only narrow attention to the significant ways normal aging was changing agers’ capacities to manage their ever-present tasks and relationships. I had looked at them…
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Pope Francis Recognizes Nurses’ “Healing Power of Listening and Touch”
This story reblogged from nurse.org. NEWS March 6, 2018 Pope Francis Calls Nurses, "Experts In Humanity" - Thanks Nurse Who Saved His Life Angelina Walker Share Now By Angelina Gibson VATICAN CITY, Mar 3, 2018 - "I thank her and I want you to know her name: Sister Cornelia Caraglio,” said Pope Francis as he … Continue reading Pope Francis Recognizes Nurses’ “Healing Power of Listening and Touch”
