Jennifer Shepherd My newest nurse hero: Jennifer Shepherd. She looks at president-elect Biden's Covid task force and asks the absolutely essential question: where are the nurses? "NO other profession in…

In an October 19, 2020 JAMA article, Herd Immunity and Implications for SARS-CoV-2 Control by Saad et al is an excellent and succinct explanation of herd immunity. We all want society to return to normal. Can we do that through herd immunity? This article gives the answer. I summarize it here.

I am a nurse but in my former career I was a computer programmer. I look with my programmer eyes at nursing and observe: nurses need more technology. But not the type of which we already have too much, e.g. EHRs,…

My friend and hero Patty Sengstack DNP RN-BC FAAN is leading yet another ground-breaking project, documented in an American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA) position paper: The Six Domains of Burden: A Conceptual Framework to Address the Burden of Documentation in the Electronic Health Record. I have groused about the heavy toll taken by EHRs on nursing and welcome Patty's more formal analysis.

Our Bay Area Nursing Informatics Association chapter (BANIA) today delivered its summer educational event, "Leading Innovation and Creating Cultures of High Performance" taught by industry luminary Dan Weberg RN PhD who works at Trusted Health that provides tech-savvy nurse staffing services. (That is, the services are tech-savvy... I hope the nurses are, too.) He described several disruptive and innovative activities in health care. (I've blogged about him before.)

We used to think that the Covid-19 virus was transmitted only by droplets in the air (and, less commonly, on surfaces we touch).

Droplets — a term with a very specific meaning in nursing, and clear protocols we must follow in caring for patients who require droplet precautions — can travel up to six feet before falling out of the air and ceasing to pose a threat.

Today I received on-line training to become a volunteer nurse screener of guests in a couple of shelters (one for women, one for men) in Madison, WI.

The screening process, too, is conducted on-line. Folks wishing admission to these shelters (Porchlight and Salvation Army) must first stop and talk with me or one of the other volunteer RNs via an Internet-connected tablet. We screen them for Covid symptoms, make sure they're wearing their mask correctly, and if necessary, triage them to a hotel (funded by Dane County, WI) or to a nearby ED.

A new meaning for the term nursing informatics? I have blogged at length here about nursing informatics. Recent experience adds a whole new layer: tech support for patients. This is a thing. Requests from patients on a…

As I have blogged before, clinicians are ill-served by technology, EHRs in particular. EHRs' primary purposes are: Data gathering (legal and regulatory), and Billing ...not supporting clinicians. Here is my recent first-person essay on what this is like for this nurse.

Here I am, on a new clinical rotation during my last semester of nursing school, having taken my patient’s vitals, assessed her skin (she is elderly, bed-bound, and at risk for bedsores), tracked her Is and Os, straightened up her bed, and it is time to do the charting before moving on to my next patient. Some earlier clinicals had been in pre-EHR (electronic health record) hospitals and I had appreciated the fine-tuned process in which, with a few check-marks („charting by exception“) and notating the changes (fortunately, my patient’s health was improving) I would have been done with this task in a couple of minutes.