Off the Charts

Many in Health Care Have Made Sense of COVID Through Art or Poetry

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 13:58:10 GMT

Since March, AJN has been inundated with COVID-19–related manuscripts from around the world, ranging from prospective feature articles to submissions for this blog as well as our Reflections and Viewpoint columns. Not unexpectedly, we are also seeing many visual art and poetry submissions to our Art of Nursing column as we all try to make sense of this pandemic experience.

Art of Nursing selections.

In the July issue, we feature a drawing and two poems that reflect the times, as well as a reprint of a recent post from this blog.

The drawing, Behind the Front Lines, is by Hayley Jasper, an award-winning artist who is a junior in high school. Hayley’s piece was inspired by her mother, who is an ICU nurse in a COVID-19 unit.

The poem “Alone, surrounded” was written by Dublin geriatrician Shane O’Hanlon. Behavioral health nurse Marianne Broyles wrote the poem “Using Time Wisely During COVID-19.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

And I feel very small, like a field mouse.
It is all I can do to
Blend in and hope the great
Horned owl will pass me over…

We hope both poems will invite you to reflect on your own experiences at this time. (For the Art of Nursing drawing and poems, please click through to the downloadable PDF versions in the upper left of each landing page to get the best version.)

Care for yourself first.

And don’t forget to “put on your own oxygen first” during these stressful months. In “Practicing the ABCDEs of Self-Care in Pandemic Times,” psychiatric NP Diane Solomon offers a potentially more hopeful spin on all this stress:

“We are familiar with posttraumatic stress, but what’s less known is a very real concept called posttraumatic growth, which occurs when we transform adversity into resilience and growth.”

For nurses, our commitment to the people we care for is often our “default” setting. Especially during trying times, don’t forget to care for yourself, too.

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Nurses Drawdown: A Global Climate Movement for Nurses

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 14:23:44 GMT

By Katie Huffling, RN, MS, CNM, FAAN

When a small group of nurses first got together nine months ago to strategize how we could harness the collective power of nurses to address climate change, we had no idea what changes 2020 would hold for the nursing community. We were excited for the Year of the Nurse and Midwife and Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday. What better time to bring nurses together to address climate change, one of the most pressing public health challenges we currently face?

Still the most trusted profession.

Now here we are midway through 2020 and the world seems completely different, with much of the globe still in quarantine as we battle COVID-19. But one thing hasn’t changed, and in fact the response to the pandemic has only made it more apparent to the world: nurses truly deserve the title of the most trusted profession. We are now in the spotlight, showing the exceptional professionalism, caring, and passion that are hallmarks of our profession. It is these qualities we are hoping to harness with the new initiative, Nurses Drawdown. If we can be leaders in responding to the global pandemic, nurses can be leaders in supporting solutions to climate change.

Nurses around the globe are invited to participate in Nurses Drawdown. The initiative is based on the science of Project Drawdown, a “research organization that reviews, analyses, and identifies the most viable global climate solutions, and shares these findings with the world.”

Nurses Drawdown invites nurses from all specialties and in all settings to take action in five key areas:

ENERGY: Supporting a clean energy future by promoting energy efficiency and advocating for a transition to renewable energy
FOOD: Committing to eat a more plant-based diet, promoting the use of clean-burning cookstoves, and reducing food waste
GENDER EQUITY: Supporting education for girls and access to family planning
MOBILITY: Promoting walkable cities, including improving bike infrastructure and mass transit
NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS: Planting trees and protecting forests

On the Nurses Drawdown website, we provide many examples of ways nurses can take action. These actions range from activities for nurses just starting to take action on climate through activities for nurses who have engaged in climate solutions for years. We hope you will find these ideas inspiring and engaging!

We want to hear from you. If you sign up on the website, we will send you more ideas a couple of times a month and will be wanting to hear from nurses around the globe about the actions you’ve committed to take and what has worked (or hasn’t).

Nurses from every continent.

In the video above, which was produced for the Nurses Drawdown launch, nurses from almost every continent talk about what inspires them to climate action and invite you to join them!

We already have close to 1000 nurses signed up and almost 20 nursing organization partners! (If you are a member of a nursing organization that would like to become a partner, they can sign up here.)

Please join us as we transform the global climate movement. There is hope and courage when we work together for a better future for all!

Katie Huffling, RN, MS, CNM, FAAN, is the executive director of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments

See also these recent articles:

“Nurses and Climate Change“
“Reducing Waste and Increasing Sustainability in Health Care Settings” (part of AJN’s series in collaboration with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments)

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Nurses: In the Face-Off With COVID, We’re Doing ‘Alright’

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 13:54:30 GMT

We did alright during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We’ve done alright during Ebola. We’re doing alright during COVID. We’ve done alright through war, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and typhoons. We’re neither politicians, nor business owners; we’re not in banking or finance (though some of us might have a side hustle or two).

We’re nurses, and we show up.

Let’s be clear, alright is not “OK,” it’s not “good,” and currently it’s “head barely above water.” Alright is persistence, though, and it’s perseverance. We’re all suffering. Those of us who have worked in past epidemics are having flashbacks, we still don’t have enough protective gear, and we’re scared to death of bringing COVID home to our loved ones.

Here’s a real gem, to boot: When COVID started and picked up exponential speed in the U.S., we were touted as heroes. And now as the waves of cases roll in again, because of the extraordinary financial hit that health care has taken we’re the first to be flexed off and furloughed.

“Hey hero, thanks for your service! We can’t pay you any longer. Good luck.”

Why we keep showing up.

But we’re doing alright, and this is why: There is a sense of profound meaning in the work that we do. As impossible as it is some days, when we provide patient care we can see that our work has an impact. Even if saving someone’s life is not possible, we have the platform to be compassionate. Every day. When we are caring for patients with wisdom and compassion, we find purpose.

As the stressors of this work increase, so too does a feeling of camaraderie. I’ve heard some of my colleagues say that they feel safer at work, surrounded by COVID patients, than they do out in public, because at least in the hospital they work with nurses who know what they’re doing and who understand the science of how to stay safe.

This battle, like so many of those that nurses have faced, is grueling and complex. What is steady and undeniable, however, is our strength. Count on us—we’ll keep showing up.

Tim Cunningham is vice-president, practice and innovation, at Emory Healthcare, and adjunct assistant professor, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory Healthcare, Atlanta, Georgia. His Viewpoint, “The Burden of Resilience Should Not Fall Solely on Nurses,” will be published in AJN’s September issue.

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How to Know When to Go: One Nurse’s Approach to the Retirement Question

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:35:40 GMT

Many possible takes on ‘retirement.’

When I meet many of my nursing school mates from (too many) years ago, conversation inevitably turns toward talk of retirement. There are many angles to this, from “Are you going to retire?” to “Are you thinking of slowing down?” to “What are you going to do next?”

I have friends who couldn’t wait to retire and wanted nothing more than an empty schedule to be able to make spur-of-the-moment decisions about what they wanted to do or not do. Others I know also retired fully from nursing but now are docents in museums, driving meals-on-wheels, supervising exercise in an elderly day care facility. And of course there are many who just “cut back”—they work part-time or per diem, but “keep their hand in.”

Photo by Aaron Cynic.

But the decision on when to leave a full-time career can be a difficult one, as the author of the July Transitions column, “What Would Ellen Do?” (free until August 20), points out.

Ellen Elpern was an advanced practice critical care nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, a large urban academic medical center, loved the work and enjoyed working with her colleagues.

In making her decision to retire, she says, a main concern was not to stay too long, to be one of those people that coworkers whispered about as “needing to go.” She made her decision to leave when changes in administrative and clinical training requirements as well as family changes led her to want more time for herself (grandchildren will do that).

Leaving on her own terms.

This article has some great lessons—one that particularly struck me was her decision to usurp the traditional farewell party. Instead, Elpern planned and hosted a party for all the colleagues she worked with, thanking them for their part in enabling her to have such an enjoyable and rewarding career. Makes me wish I had worked with this thoughtful person!

Any doubts she had about her impact or the esteem in which her colleagues held her was erased when staff later sent her a photo showing them sporting buttons with the letters WWED (translation: What Would Ellen Do?). Ellen now volunteers at another Chicago hospital to provide information to patients about advance directives.

Here’s a podcast of my conversation with Ellen:

https://ajnoffthecharts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AJN0720.Elpern.mp3

(PS. Given what we learned about Ellen from her story, it should be no surprise that during the surge in patient admissions during COVID-19 pandemic, she returned to Rush to volunteer on the proning team in the ICU.)

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