Whether or not you support President Obama's healthcare reform, whether or not you're a member of the ANA, nurses can agree on one thing: the healthcare bill was one big piece of legislation, and the ANA and nurses were involved in its creation.  Get involved. How many times have you heard those words? Probably many (too many?), but ...

When nurses go on strike, it can be a thankless undertaking. They may be fighting for an ideal of better patient care, while at the same time walking away from the patients for whom they are caring. It's a ''damned if you do, damned if you don't'' situation. At Philadelphia's Temple University Hospital (TUH), that scenario is playing out as some ...

Nursing’s ranking as the most trusted profession in America the past 8 years in Gallup’s annual Honesty & Ethics poll is testament to the reverence with which the public holds the caring profession. It’s a sentiment nurses return each day when they go to work. In fact, for some that sense of commitment to caring about and for ...

I was at the gym, doing the obligatory 40 minutes on an elliptical. I was willing to read anything I could get my hands on to help pass time and minimize the drudgery of pumping toward nowhere. To my great joy, wedged among the body-building magazines was an outdated issue of Marie Claire magazine. So with legs straining and heart thumping, I ...

Nurses are big proponents of evidence-based practice. Nurses are working hard to move away from ''this is how it's always been done,'' or ''I had a patient once who had a reaction to that treatment so I don't do it.'' A big part of looking at evidence is numbers. Nurses need to question whether something can be considered evidence based on the ...

At some point in our lives we'll all want a personal patient safety advocate to stand up for us when we're not receiving the care we need. As nurses, this job often falls in your lap. In fact, you're mandated by your boards of nursing to report substandard care. Simply put, it's your job to protect the patient; even when he needs protection from ...

If you think the fictional Nurse Jackie and HawthoRNe are bad for nursing’s image, just wait until you hear about one real-life nurse in California. Like many, I could not escape the media frenzy following Michael Jackson’s death. Internet, TV, newspapers, magazines and even my iPhone was giving me minute details of the singer’s final days, his ...

Most of us probably know by now that no less than three primetime shows are featuring nurses in primary roles.  After decades of St. Elsewhere, Quincy, House Calls and most recently ER and Grey's Anatomy; it's about time a healthcare drama was put forward with a nurse's point to view.  That should be reason enough for nurses to stand ...

To ensure nurses' voices are heard during the debate on healthcare reform, the America Nurses Association (ANA) and other organizations that comprise Health Care for America Now will hold a rally in Washington, DC, June 25. Nurses will meet at 11:30 a.m. in Upper Senate Park, Constitutional Avenue and Delaware Street NE, to lobby Congress in ...

Anyone who lives in an area where a major road construction project has been planned has probably experienced this. You go to a meeting at the local high school or community center where Department of Transportation engineers explain the proposed location of each route, compare the costs of constructing each route and, of most concern to the ...