The US’ New Cadre of Josef Mengeles

I’m stewing over the posts by Valtin about the use of US psychologists as agents of torture. I’m heartsick and soul sick at the evidence that Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein produced in their Washington Post Careless Detainee series about the use of nurses and physicians as agents of abuse and torture.
And just in [...]

Legal Aspects Of Practicing Nursing As A Federal Government Employee

Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein are presenting an enormous four part investigative series called Careless Detention in the Washington Post, in which they take a hard look at how detainees have and continue to be treated in negligent and harmful ways by healthcare providers and prison personnel.
Throughout the reports, they include case after case after [...]

Healthcare-Associated Infections And Nursing

I greatly admire Representative Henry Waxman, the Chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He asks direct questions to uncover problems, abuses and negligence by government and civilian agencies, organizations and individuals. Today, he issued a letter to each of the 50 states’ hospital association chairs, requesting data on the incidence [...]

Where’s Nursing?

The Washington Independent’s Mike Lillis wrote an interesting piece about how legislators are dancing around the edge of healthcare policy, not wanting to commit themselves to anything that possibly might unsettle the corpulent stomachs of the industry’s heavy hitters’ bottom lines. But once again, do a search for the terms nurse and nursing. Come [...]

When Bad Is Good: The Dow(n) Is Up World of the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal just loves misery. Here’s the latest celebration of it with a nursing twist. Its related blog post echoed its story sentiment.

The ailing economy is helping to ease the nursing shortage.
With house prices falling and the cost of gasoline and food rising, many nurses are going back to work, in some [...]

Emergency Department Surge Capacity: There Ain’t None

[UPDATE 05-07-2008 Day Two of the Hearing is today with Michael Leavitt, Sec DHHS  and Michael Chertoff, Sec DHS testifying. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee added their testimony and that of Dean Conway-Welch, and the links are at their names.
What comes through loud and clear is the BushCo loyalism of Chertoff: "not my [...]

Nurses Week 2008: “There Were No Nurses”

I wrote this post over a year ago, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. The first week in May - to be more precise, May 6-12 - has been designated - mostly by hospital and nursing employers’ marketing departments - as Nurses Week. It’s usually filled with [...]

Frontline Begins, But Doesn’t Get To Nursing

Frontline recently presented an intriguing story about looking at several key factors in designing health care systems across five Western countries and then making some comparisons with the US non-system system.  But after visiting the Frontline web pages, my perceptions were confirmed:  nurses were again ignored in evaluating and designing health care systems.  My response [...]

Daily Constitutional: Torture and Torturous

Military.com reports about the Pentagon’s detailed evidence of abuse of Afghan prisoners.
The LA Times addresses the horrendous state of prison health care.  And yet, no mention is made of the widespread criminalization of people with mental illness.  over 50% of all inpatient psychiatric care is delivered in prisons.  The answer isn’t in adding to the prison [...]

Preventable Deaths and Preventable Patient Harm = Absence of Professional Nursing

I’ve been ranting and raving the part week or so about the absence of reportage about nursing issues in the media, both traditional and new media, including the feminist and progressive blogospheres.
Two stories today reflect the travesty of this.  The first is the announcement of Dana Priest and Anne Hull receiving well-merited Pulitzer Prizes for [...]

Everyone Grades Nursing Success Except Nurses

Reed Abelson reports for the NYTimes about  a Medicare program which used telephonic patient contact by registered nurses to manage chronic diseases. Not for nothin’, the story appears in the Business section - significant for it not being published in the Health section of the newspaper.
An ambitious three-year experiment to see whether the Medicare system [...]

Daily Constitutional: Dumpster Diving For Your Privacy

Lots of health-related links to share today.  Fourth Amendment - remember that?  The electronic medical records development is derailing medical records privacy, and the Personal Health Privacy Information net  will keep you updated on the latest breaches, concerns and solutions. The Mike the Mad Biologist explains that the NIH discusses allocation of funds for research [...]

Help!

Poor Phoenix Woman at Mercury Rising. She covers issues terrifically well, writes compellingly and shines a light into some very dark areas. She even mentioned a nursing issue the other day. Hurrah!
But although she mentioned a nursing issue, she did so with a two line throwaway blurb, and she didn’t get the story context accurately. [...]

Oh Bless Us, Everyone!

[UPDATE]  Digby is thoughtfully analyzing the story from several perspectives, including the media narrative which ignorantly distorts the story, its significance, and which implies that Clinton is exploiting and fabricating a story, where that does not appear to be the case, after fact checking, and an updated fact-checking story coming off the AP wire, and [...]

When Tying A Knot Isn’t Just Tying A Knot

[UPDATE] From Scott Horton’s No Comment column at Harper’s comes this gem which provides a prescient analogy for what damage the WSJ blog post does to nursing, and to the public which it serves.  It paints doctorally prepared nurses as the threat and as the enemy, and it undermines the public’s trust in the profession.  That’s [...]