So I'm sitting here waiting at 4am for my Lortab elixir to kick in and I thought I'd share my experience as a patient today-- First, I'm an RN in Med/Surg/Onc/Tele with 2 years experience. I take care of post ops everyday, but I was still very scared going to OR as I've never had anything done myself. I went and signed in, and the clerk was...

It was my second year of my four year BSN program. My very first set of actual nursing clinicals. The ones where we actually went somewhere, and that was a LTC. I was excited, scared, and every other emotion all combined. I was actually more emotional than I pictured myself. I was so emotional I was nauseated. I was exhausted. On our...

The Patient Nurse It is not easy to switch roles. Especially if one has been in their particular role for a couple of decades. It just doesn’t feel “right” to be the patient. I did not like it, not one bit. To make matters worse, I was a patient in my own hospital. I had an elective orthopedic procedure requiring a three day stay. ...

I would just like to thank the nurses who attended to my son, myself and the rest of my extended family in 2009, and by extension to every nurse around the world who similarly attended to suspected broken feet and legs (myself and my son), gall stones (mother-in-law) and to the bizarre occasion when my son managed to get his foot jammed into the...

The little vestibule is dark, chocolate colored, the wood paneling hinting of a grander time. “PIZZA!” “WINGS’!” “DIM SUM!” shout from the papers scattered on the check-tiled floor. It smells of my grandparents’ home in Brooklyn – a mix of polish and roasting chicken. When the door closes behind me I am caught in a small capsule full of dull echo....

I was born and raised in a country with a warm climate, and as fate would have it, the beautiful woman who became my wife didn’t. To speed this along, I found myself moving pretty much to the other side of the planet to a new country, with a new climate and a new language to learn. The only job I could get before I could converse in this new...

There is nothing more rewarding than Psychiatric nursing. With 16 years of experience, nothing prepared me for this eye opening encounter as did this tiny little 81 year old lady. Working in a Geriatric Psychiatric Hospital, a lot of our patients are awake at night which requires the staff to do a lot of interactions with them to help promote...

I don't even remember when I started writing or even remember when I stopped. I am writing this just to make sure I won't forget. I never intended to be a nurse,not at all but as fate would want to play it I became one. Time flies,it surely does. I have been through numerous med pass, cleansed a lot of wounds, dealt with gore (not really),...

It took me a while to come back to writing after a nap that rested my mind that exhausted for the entire busy and hectic week that I have had. I have been thinking for the entire night about thing I have learned after the event that encountered yesterday in relation to the issue of ‘Patient Safety’. I had a trembling and shocking day...

Theory, research, science, and practice are the four core elements of the discipline of nursing. They form a continuous “circle of knowledge” (Moccia, 1987). Theory leads to research, research leads to science, science leads to practice, and practice then cycles back to theory. New theory emanating from practice will generate new studies that will, in turn, produce new knowledge for practice. It is an interactive and reciprocal relationship, with the ultimate aim of improving nursing practice (McKenna, 1997). This cyclical process is especially important in nursing care of vulnerable populations, such as the elderly.

Structural equations comprehensively represent the complex multidimensional relations among research variables in a theory. Structural equation modeling (or SEM) is a sophisticated class of multivariate analytic statistical techniques used to examine the underlying relationships, or structure, among variables in a model. SEM allows the researcher to model, test, and reduce hypothesized relationships among a set of observed variables. SEM seeks to represent hypotheses about the means, variances, and covariances of observed data in terms of parameters defined by a hypothesized underlying model.

Shift change. Lights blinked and bells dinged in front of almost every room on the 40-bed telemetry unit as day shifters reported off. I organized the kardexes on my six patients, quickly stapling them together and fanfolding them so I could see at a glance what meds were due for each patient and when. I had the last 4 rooms on the longest hall. The rooms were the farthest from the Pyxis. My feet started aching just thinking about it. Here at the nurse’s station, the tele monitors were blocked by people trying to pick up their assignments. I decided to get report first, then come back to see what my patients’ heart rates and rhythms were.

Nursing interventions are created moments. To me, "real nursing" is a moment created to identify and intervene, to connect with a patient and influence that patient to modify a behavior or an erroneous thought that holds them back from healing.

We've all been there: you get an ambulance call that EMS is bringing in an elderly patient who had a ground level fall and now their leg is shortened and externally rotated. Oh and by the way, they have dementia. Ugh...could your night get any worse? Here are some tips for dealing with the patients who are demented...

As anyone who's ever worked with the elderly knows, every care facility has its "characters": the curmudgeon, the hothouse flower, the Church Lady. And the best-kept secret in the business is the hilarity that ensues whenever one of these folks offers his or her commentaries on everyday events.

Alzheimer’s disease affects 5% of older adults in the US. It is the most common type of dementia, and its effects are devastating for both the individual and the extended family unit, as well as being very expensive for society overall. The odds of developing AD double for each five-year period after the age of 65. By age 85, one-third to one-half of elders exhibit some signs and symptoms of this dementia.

The recession has definitely left its mark on universities and community colleges. Funding is being slashed, educators' salaries are frozen, faculty workloads are increasing, supplies are in short demand, and fear and uncertainty abound.

Visit the all new allnurses Central - everyone is free to join. allnurses-central.com is an off-topic general discussions site for Nurses. Already an allnurses.com member? Log in with same username/password. One account gives you access to both sites.

The affective domain describes a person's emotional attributes. As educators, why should we be concerned with the affective domain and how can these factors impact teaching and learning? Bloom divided the process of learning into three broad hierarchical domains, or taxonomies. The three parts are not clear-cut, but overlap and interrelate.

I'm not sure if it's because I was a good deal older than many of my classmates when I graduated from nursing school and found out very quickly that I was nowhere near as smart as I thought I was, or if it's merely because I'm in awe of nurses who are around my age and have practiced for many more years than I. But whatever the reason, the road...