If you were given the privilege to provide care to the entire world, what would it be like? What microcosm of the world population (which stands at exactly 6,962,449,235 people as I write this) would be representative of the entire world in a single hospital of just 100 patients? Actually the math has been done, and redone, since 1990 when ...

Dorothy had a rough passage, on the winds of a ferocious tornado, to get to her Technicolor land of Oz. I visited a destination similarly colorful last week -- coral-blushed Bermuda.  My voyage was a little easier -- Royal Caribbean Line's Grandeur of the Seas carried me safely through the Bermuda Triangle. On the other side of that ...

On a brief jaunt last week, I met a fellow traveler -- a retired military officer whose career spanned various deployments to Germany, Panama and Vietnam. We discussed at length the tone of the nation in the 1960s when he was fighting an unseen enemy in an Asian jungle. Eventually, we talked about the sadness he felt when he returned to ...

Now that I have been fully enveloped in my first semester junior year rotation, I have discovered more and more about nursing as a profession. I am working on a cardiac/telemetry floor in a hospital that is in the type of area that a mere three blocks away no nurse would choose to walk alone at night. But, regardless of the area, it is a city ...

If you live on the East coast and would like to meet Joe Niemczura, MS, RN, known affectionately on this blog as ''Joe the Nurse,'' the time is almost at hand. This affable nursing instructor at the University of Hawaii - Manoa/Nepal nursing instructor/author will greet the public, present a slide show on his Nepal adventures, display ...

Just when you thought nurses were under-represented on TV, we now have no fewer than three primetime series about the lives of nurses. Since the ''nursing shortage'' in primetime has all but been eliminated, the question now is: Which series most accurately depicts the ''real'' lives of nurses? Keep in mind that all TV is ''heightened reality.'' ...

''I spent 15 years of my career doing critical care,'' said Joe Niemczura, MSN, RN. ''Sure, I can run hemodynamic monitoring ... But, if you have a high-tech background in nursing, just throw that out the window. In Nepal, they don't have hemodynamic monitoring, they don't have PIC lines. They don't do TPM. They're new at giving insulin because ...

This is not the next ''official'' installment of this globetrotting blog. Next up in just a few days, as promised, will be more of the adventures of Joe ''the Snake Man'' Niemczura, MS, RN, in Nepal. Instead, this is just a shameless plug for a story that I had the pleasure of writing about RNs from Flying Nurses International ...

AIDS seemed to be a hot topic Wednesday at the National Black Nurses Association Convention in Toronto. The last full day of the conference commenced with a spirited skit that raised awareness about how nurses can best encourage testing and navigate sensitive issues in caring for patients with recently diagnosed with AIDS. The topic came up again ...

Foreign languages are a way of traveling without leaving home. There are subtleties in language that can only be understood within the context of culture, words that cannot be precisely translated. It's a journey to some undiscovered syllabic territory. Like spoken music, language pulses with a characteristic rhythm and cadence that somehow belies ...