Notions to small for a blog post, all in one place.
Pomodoro is not just Italian for tomato. It’s actually an effective time-management technique. Like (for example) in clearing up unanswered emails. I find it actually keeps me focussed on writing, and helps me avoid the ever-present temptation of the evil Twitter.
The best thing about basic nursing is that it reminds you of why you became a nurse. An elemental truth. Susan Eller explains:
This patient in the hallway, waiting for a bed and needing some pain medications just needed some routine nursing care: comfort measures, information, and compassion.
Yet, the wife took my hand before they left the ED and thanked me for taking the time. She appreciated that even though he wasn’t my patient, and she could see that I was busy, that I took the time to make sure that he was informed and comfortable.
It startled me that she was so grateful. In my perspective, I was just doing my job the way I always do it. In the scope of my busy day with critically ill patients who needed so much more, this tiny little thing that I did made an impact on her.
Coal Cares. Really, they do.
And the high and mighty this campaign managed to piss off. Given the thousands that air pollution kills every year by exacerbating various respiratory illnesses, you’d think the coal industry — whose contribution to poor air quality is remarkable — would be a little less, um, shameless.
Parakeet madness in Britain. Hitchcock would have a field day.
A good source of nursing blogs (via @DrDeanBurke). Oh, yeah. There I am. Sweet.
More on bullying. The Nursing Ethics Blog:
The hardest questions I’ve ever been asked by med students and nursing students have to do with bullying, and with the difficulties inherent in being at the bottom of their respective professional hierarchies. Students understandably find it difficult — and a source of moral distress — to be not only subject to bullying, but to sometimes be involved in courses of action that they see as unethical and yet powerless to do anything about it.
In discussions I’ve seen around the Interwebs this past week, the consensus seems to be the risk of bullying decreases with experience and growth of confidence. Which begs the question: why do we subject the most valuable and vulnerable members of our profession to this behaviour?
And still more. From a med student who gets it:
As a medical student, I’ve witnessed and experienced my share of bullying by a handful of doctors (though to be fair, by nurses as well). In one instance, I watched a surgeon mock a new nurse in the operating room, teaching her with absurd faux-patience how to properly hand him his instruments.
And silence still kills. “Research and regulatory bodies have long confirmed that poor communication in healthcare is harmful at best and deadly at worst.”
Dept. of It Was Too Good To be True. Magnet hospitals are just as sucky for nurses as normal hospitals. Except they’re better at self-promotion.
Housekeeping. The spam filter has been acting up again. I gave it a good swift kick, and restored some comments that were placed in the spam file.
Also if you have emailed in past while and I haven’t gotten back to you, I will. A friend of mine declared email bankruptcy and deleted a whack of messages in one fell swoop, on the theory she was never going to asnwerthem, and they were just sitting there, making her worried and a little neurotic. Not quite there, but I can see the premise.