Kids Explore Nursing in Summer Camp

Remember summer camp? A day of homesickness, followed by a week or two of new friends, craft classes, sports and the requisite tears when everyone parted and headed home? Good times, for sure. They weren’t so common when I was a kid but, now, specialty camps, including several for wannabe nurses, have popped up around the country.

What a great idea to get a taste of the nursing profession early on, plan a high school curriculum heavy in the sciences and be prepared to step right into college with an eye on the prize, so to speak. Or, not. Some say these camps are a part of the answer to the nursing shortage. I don’t think so. The shortage has very little, if anything, to do with a lack of interest in the profession. The long wait lists to get into most programs attest to that.

I do see value in these camps, nonetheless, because they can be a definitive experience, positive or negative, for some attendees. If it is positive, the student’s career choice is validated and he/she can stay the course. More important, in my opinion, is the negative outcome. The one that leads the student to say, “Absolutely not! I’ve got to find a career that suits me better.”

Vying for a spot in a nursing program is so competitive these days, acceptance so coveted, nurses in such short supply, that the profession cannot afford to lose a nurse because of a student’s realization, several months into the program, that nursing is not a good fit. Figuring that out beforehand is an advantage for both the program and the student.

If you know a young person (ages of campers, depending upon the camp, range from 11 to early high school) who is interested in a nursing career, drop a hint that these programs exist and are worth investigating.

The Importance of Health Literacy

How often do we as nurses rattle off medical jargon to our patients who, simply put, don’t speak the language? How many times have we instructed a patient to take a medication twice a day with no explanation of exactly what that means? If the patient decides that twice a day is 7 a.m. and 11 a.m., is he wrong? No, he isn’t. That is twice a day—but likely not the optimum times to take his medication. We need to be speaking to our patients in specific terms. Specific and simple.

Having spent many years working with the medically indigent, the necessity for health care providers to speak in clear, simple and specific terms that can be understood by the majority of adults is a soap box issue for me. You’ll be hearing more from me on the subject. There are just too many facets of health literacy to address in one short rant.

I don’t think the majority of us throw around medical terms to show off our big vocabularies. More likely, we have become so accustomed to “med speak” that we don’t even realize we’re speaking what sounds like a foreign tongue to our patients. I am here to promote Plain Speak.

Even though I thought I was using Plain Speak, it seemed to take forever to get across to my husband the fact that the largest spoon in the silverware drawer was not an accurate measure of a one-tablespoon dose of cough syrup. If a man with a college degree, a vice president of a large corporation, whose grandmother, sister and wife are RNs has trouble (or a resistance to) absorbing that concept, obviously our more vulnerable population requires individual, specific and simple instruction.

Educating a patient to correctly take his medication is merely the tip of the iceberg. Health literacy, or the lack of it, encompasses the broad spectrum of all things medical. I mention medication because it is a simple-to-understand example and we have to start somewhere. It’s a baby step. I urge all nurses to take a baby step, start where you are and challenge yourself to speak to your patients about their health in clear and simple words they can understand.

A 2003 study determined that 90 million adults in the U.S.—almost half—lack the skills to use our health system effectively. Attaining comprehensive health literacy is enormously important to the wellbeing of our populace and to relieving the stress on our health care system, financially and institutionally. Take your first baby step today.

Nurse Survives as Patient

I am happy to report that all is well in the world of nursing. That is true, at least, in a certain Colorado hospital where I recently had surgery and spent one blissful night (I’m not kidding—it was wonderful). Hospitalization is a rare occurrence for me and, because it had been several years since my last one, I viewed this planned hospital stay as something of a fact-finding mission.

These are the facts I found: The nurses who cared for me were professional, pleasant, skilled, efficient, caring and thorough. When I asked questions, they had answers. Often, they gave me answers before I asked the questions. They were excellent educators. There were no surprises—the nurses were exactly as I expected they would be. If there is such a thing as a perfect hospital experience, I would have to say I had one.

I have been a RN for many years, during which time my pride in the nursing profession has never wavered. Despite having to deal with the frustrating and exhausting issues of understaffing and mandatory overtime, to name but two, nurses somehow manage to keep their patients’ needs at the forefront. You may say, “Of course we do. That’s what we’re supposed to do.” Well, sure. But, we all know that theory and practice can easily diverge, if allowed to. Stretched thin, hours on the feet, juggling career and family, yet nurses are creatively and skillfully doing what it takes, all for the bottom line—the patient. My nursing cap (remember those?) is off to each and every nurse who shows up every day to do it the way it should be done.

Mentoring New Nurses--Well--is Vital

The subject of new RNs being set adrift in their first jobs, not exactly rudderless but with insufficient guidance, has been popping up in a number of journals and online discussions. The confidence of new RNs may be shaky and they are often, understandably, tentative. It seems there is a need for the mentoring of new graduates that, in many cases, is not being met. The job dissatisfaction brought on by the you’re-on-your-own atmosphere results in significant job turnover.

Whether the veteran nurses’ reluctance or tacit refusal to take the novice RNs under their wings is brought about by time constraints, resistance to acceptance of new colleagues or an attitude of superiority, the results are the same: new nurses begin to doubt their abilities, fear asking questions and feel anxious.

To combat the situation, some hospitals are wisely instituting new nurse internship and preceptor programs, with support for the new hires not left to chance.

All of this has caused me to reflect on my first job and to realize how fortunate I was to land in a department where not a single nurse ever made me feel dumb or inferior in any way; where the nursing staff kindly helped me learn the ropes, to master the routines and become adept at executing procedures that were specific to our area of the hospital. An incredibly skilled LPN also did her part. She was knowledgeable, patient, cheerful and she was a friend. I'm grateful to all those nurses who gave me the big boost I needed to build my confidence and to do the very best for my patients.

A male nursing school classmate of mine remarked recently that, while some veteran nurses are guilty of “eating their young,” he makes every effort to support new nurses. “They are the ones who will be taking care of me,” he said. Perhaps a tad self-serving, but, still, an excellent reason to nurture those new to the profession.

The Laying on of Hands

I want you to reach out and touch someone today. And, I want that someone to be one (or more) of your patients. As a young ER nurse I was fortunate to work with a wise young physician who was a proponent of, as he termed it, the laying on of hands. He was a big believer in the therapeutic effects of human touch. He enjoyed demonstrating the effectiveness of a physical connection between patient and caregiver and he encouraged all the ER staff to follow his lead in making those connections.

He would explain how to unobtrusively initiate contact and, then, when an occasion presented itself, he would take us individually into a patient’s treatment room and strut his stuff. The level of patient anxiety is likely higher in the ER than in most other areas of the hospital, so there were plenty of opportunities to see immediate and frequent results. Standing by the bed, he would hold a hand or place his hand on a shoulder or even on a lower leg or foot as he spoke to the patient. The calming effects were remarkable.

My experience in that ER was brought to mind by a recent e-mail sent to me by my friend, Doug, who is a big deal in the sport of rock climbing. Doug related the story of two of his climbing buddies who took a break from the rocks for a day of skiing. In their quest to ski the most pristine snow, they went out of bounds to do so and touched off an avalanche that slammed one of them into a tree, snapping his humerus and leaving him bruised and battered.

Because they were skiing a roped-off area, summoning help would’ve resulted in the revocation of their season’s ski passes, so the uninjured skier shoulder-carried his roughed-up friend down and out of the gully and to their VW van for the trip to the ER. En route, they were sideswiped hard by a semi that slid into their lane on an icy curve, turning both skiers into patients.

Doug got word of the escapade gone bad and went to the ER to check on his friends. He found the friend-toting driver of the VW in good shape so went to look for the guy with the broken arm.

“He was all wrapped in blankets, but shivering so violently he banged the steel table,” Doug wrote. “I walked in and took his hand. Suddenly the color returned to his face and the shaking stopped. I’ve never seen such a dramatic leap out of shock. And all it took was lending a friendly hand.”

These days, the laying on of hands has a new, more sophisticated name: healing touch therapy. Whatever we call it, it can work wonders. Go forth and touch.

When the Nurses are the Patients

When nurses become patients, do they tend to evaluate the care they receive as they are receiving it? Maybe say to themselves, “I could’ve done that better,” or, “I would’ve done that differently?”

I have been a hospital patient a few times since beginning my nursing career. Several years have passed since my last admission but I don’t recall keeping a mental checklist, rating the professional performance of my caregivers. I take that to mean, since it is usually the less than ideal experiences that stick with us, that I was not unhappy with the quality of my care. Foremost, I remember just enjoying the R&R—having an ironclad excuse to put family, home and career responsibilities on hold for a little while.

Soon, I will once again be a hospital patient. This time I plan to pay more attention to the little things going on around me. Not with a critical purpose, but more like research. I recently wondered, in a blog entry here, if nurses would be offended by a patient’s questioning whether the nurse had washed his or her hands before performing any kind of a procedure on the patient. I plan to see firsthand. I’m going to ask that question and take notice of the reactions to it.

Ever the interviewer, always the conversation aficionado, I expect that I’ll be asking lots of questions, personal and professional, of my nurses. I don’t have a specific line of questioning in mind. I’m counting on situations, facets of which will inspire a good chat, presenting themselves in great numbers. We shall see how it all plays out and I will share my new insights (there are sure to be some) here in this space.

Everyone Deserves Health Care

How did health care—the whole gargantuan system—get so big, so complicated and so expensive? It’s almost incomprehensible that this country, the most prosperous on Earth, does not have a health care plan to meet the needs of its medically indigent citizens.

Social Security was instituted more than 7 decades ago. Medicare for the elderly has been around for forty years. Where has forethought regarding health care for the masses been hiding all that time? Surely putting a plan in place would’ve been a more manageable undertaking all those years ago when the population was smaller and medicine was simpler.

Perhaps I’m letting my pessimistic side take over, but it seems to me that trying to get a leash on Monster Health Care now is akin to herding cats—gaining control of one aspect only to have it wriggle loose when attention is turned to another.

At the beginning of 2007, governors of three populous states—California, Illinois and Pennsylvania—announced plans for sweeping restructuring of health care in their states. As this New Year begins, none of the three states has enacted any part of the proposed changes.

Insurance companies and other health-related business lobbies have dug in their heels and are fighting steadfastly to prevent passage of measures that will cut into their profits. Throw partisan politics into the mix and the possibility of progress of any kind begins to seem like a fairy tale.

My first job as a new RN was working in a hospital-based outpatient department that operated as a big multi-specialty clinic for the medically indigent. The clinic served as a training ground for the hospital’s house staff and it was a busy place. The demand for health care was greater than its availability then, as it is now. We overbooked appointments and put in more hours than our shifts called for. There was no other way, because resources were stretched thin and adequate manpower just wasn’t there to allow us to do otherwise. I quickly developed empathy for those good folks whose backs were often against the wall when it came to finding, let alone affording, medical care. All these years later, the needs remain and the solutions are still elusive.

At this point, all I can be is hopeful. I’m hoping for a miracle.