What would you do if you saw lasagna, pizza, cupcakes, or chocolates spread out on a table on your floor? You’d eat it, right? Theresa Brown, RN, explains just how much nurses love to eat in The New York Times Well blog Patients and their families often bring their nurses gifts of some type of food. With stress eating a common problem, Brown explains that it’s easy for nurses to eat their feelings. However, the food also represents a...  Read More »

A growing popularity of book clubs is hitting the medical field. This ABC News report explores why literature is beneficial for physicians, nurses, and any other caretaker. Reading literature written from a patient’s point of view, such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir of the late French Elle Editor-in-Chief Jean-Dominique Bauby (who essentially wrote the book through blinking after a stroke left him almost completely...  Read More »

Patients can be quite hard to understand, making them difficult to treat. It’s important to look out for certain behaviors, especially obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Remember: Obsessions are thoughts that occur over and over again Compulsions are acts the person performs as a way to deal with obsessive parts Obsessive-compulsive behaviors are most often seen in anxiety disorders, called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In OCD,...  Read More »

The numbers are staggering. In the span of a week, Bonnie Clair, MSN, RN, and a group of 25 other healthcare professionals saw 2,196 patients and gave out 6,500 prescriptions. “Yes, we were very busy,” she says. Clair, the retention project manager at Cox Health in Springfield, MO, went on a medical mission trip to Haiti for a week in March. It was seven days she’ll never forget. After a few weeks of letting the experience...  Read More »

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has those few nurses that are complete flirts with the doctors. They call them by their first names, touch them, and even sometimes go out with them outside of work. Sometimes it can make me very uncomfortable because I see my relationship with the doctors as strictly professional. Not that long ago, I overheard a doctor asking about me and whether or not I was married. I found that completely...  Read More »

Appropriate treatment can help ease symptoms of depression in patients, but it’s essential to monitor their conditions and responses to medications to get them feeling like their old selves again. In general, remind patients that their negative feelings and attitudes are symptoms of their condition, and that positive thinking will replace negative thinking as they respond to treatment and their mood lifts. By doing this, you are acknowledging...  Read More »

Fran loves the spotlight. Our cartoon nurse insisted on being on the top of the new Web site, on the cover of all the books in the series, and on all the T-shirts we give away at the NSNA conventions and as prizes to our contest winners. Still, that wasn’t enough. Fran wanted another YouTube video. Sure, the first one was viewed by more than 15,000 (and counting) sets of eyes. And sure, it helped put Fran on the map in the nursing...  Read More »

“That patient in 310 is soooo needy! He won’t eat, complains about everything, and refuses to ask for help to get around! ARRGGHHH!” How many of us are guilty of saying something like this about our patients? We say it to co-workers, ourselves, and doctors. We even say it loud enough to be overheard at the nurses’ station. Then we wonder why the family seems distant to us. We all have the things that make us come...  Read More »

By Richard Freedberg, RN, MSN, MPA Have you ever had one of those days? You introduce yourself to the patient assigned to you in clinical, “Hi, I’m Rick, your student nurse,” and he or she responds, “Great, another rookie! I feel like a guinea pig! Why don’t you just go practice somewhere else?”  Your experience seems to plummet from there. What went wrong? How can you establish a relationship? How can...  Read More »