DiversityNursing Blog

TED talks are a community of short talks, usually under 18 minutes long with the goal to use the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. Here is a list of top Nursing TED talks that motivate, inspire, and engage!

Nurse Innovation: Saving the Future of Healthcare

Rebecca Love talks about how Nurses represent nearly half of the healthcare workforce and are the end user of nearly every medical product on the market, but they are rarely if ever engaged in the decision-making process by which new health care products are designed, constructed and brought to market. This is a huge missed opportunity that is resulting in costly inefficiencies and leading to the highest levels of Nurse burnout ever recorded.

In The Opioid Crisis, Here's What it Takes to Save a Life

Fire Chief and Nurse, Jan Rader has spent her career saving lives. But when the opioid epidemic hit her town, she realized they needed to take a brand-new approach to life-saving. In this powerful, hopeful talk, Rader shows what it's like on the front lines of this crisis and how her community is taking an unusual new approach to treating substance-abuse disorder that starts with listening.

A Tribute To Nurses

Carolyn Jones spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses across America, traveling to places dealing with some of the nation's biggest public health issues. She shares personal stories of unwavering dedication in this celebration of the everyday heroes who work at the front lines of health care.

Spreading Smiles in Hospitals, The Power of a Facility Dog

(To have this video translated to English, click the CC button in the bottom right corner of the video.) Yuko Morita shares how she became one of Japan's first facility dog trainers. Using videos of Bailey providing emotional support to the patients at a Yokohama children's clinic, she makes the case for bringing dogs (and their healthcare professional handlers) into hospitals everywhere.

The "Dementia Village" That's Redefining Elder Care

How would you prefer to spend the last years of your life: in a sterile, hospital-like institution or in a village with a supermarket, pub, theater and park within easy walking distance? The answer seems obvious now, but when Yvonne van Amerongen helped develop the groundbreaking Hogeweyk dementia care center in Amsterdam 25 years ago, it was seen as a risky break from tradition. Journey with van Amerongen to Hogeweyk and get a glimpse at what a reimagined nursing home based on freedom, meaning and social life could look like.

How To Make Stress Your Friend

Nursing is a stressful profession. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal talks about how new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. She urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.

Do You Ask Doctors Nursing Questions?

Carissa Enright discusses how often patients don’t understand the differences between the role of a Nurse and that of a Doctor. This veteran Nurse will empower patients to ask their healthcare providers the right questions through examples in her own story.

We hope you enjoy these TED talks! Do you have any favorites you want to share with us? Comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Organizations put a lot of effort into their Diversity and Inclusion programs and yet few of these efforts yield results. What are some of the reasons why D&I programs fail?

Your Diversity and Inclusion programs should be a consistent part of your organization’s culture. It should not be implemented as a response to an issue because it might appear disingenuous. These programs should be used throughout all departments to show an overall belief and commitment that D&I is important to everyone. 

Do not make the programs mandatory because when individuals feel like they don’t have a choice, this can lead to resistance and opposition to D&I programs.

Your leadership must fully support D&I for it to work well. Leadership must be committed to making D&I part of your mission, values and beliefs. It is important they understand D&I is beneficial in acquiring and retaining talent, offering culturally competent patient care, building employee engagement, and improving business performance. Your programs should always be evolving. If it's outdated, it will be ineffective. 

Employees might believe that actual changes won't be made. So it is important to lead by example and utilize what these programs teach. There should be visible and committed role models on the leadership team.

Get your employees who are closely affected by Diversity and Inclusion involved with the design and assessment of the programs to ensure they will work and take hold. Remember, you want ideas and collaboration from employees who represent different cultures, religions, ages, educational backgrounds, etc. The programs must be custom tailored to each company, using its specific culture and goals to determine the best course of action.

According to DeEtta Jones, a diversity and inclusion strategy consultant "when developing an inclusion plan, organizations should keep two goals in mind.  Any inclusion plan should be attainable and measurable.  A lofty plan with goals that can never be achieved ruins employee morale and reinforces the idea that management is not willing to make meaningful changes.  Without measurable goals, leaders and organizations cannot be held accountable for implementing the plan.  Without accountability, any plan will be ineffective.  Good inclusion plans are measurable and achievable. "

Your organization should be an inclusive environment where all employees feel comfortable and open enough to discuss and make real changes. In order to achieve this environment, we all must be aware of biases.

Kristen Pressner said in a Forbes article, "We all have biases, and it’s important to acknowledge them so behavioral tendencies can be headed off at the pass. Make a safe place for everyone to look in their full-length mirror and recognize their own biases so they can work on eliminating them. This can be as holistic as hosting training and workshops, and as personal as articulating and owning them one on one. Articulate how shifting the behavior will lead to better results. Recognizing one’s own biases is a great level set; everyone has them and can support each other in breaking them."

In a different Forbes article, Cat Graham recommends "acknowledging and recognizing great ideas, wherever they come from. Celebrate and communicate with your employees how diversity and inclusion have impacted creativity, engagement and results. Make room for different religious celebrations, and encourage staff to share their cultural heritage with others. Actively create groups that support and connect employees through their shared backgrounds."

The Diversity and Inclusion process can be difficult to perfect, but it is important to make it a major part of your organization's mission. If you have any helpful tips or experiences you’d like to share, please do so here.

An article from the American Journal of Nursing notes the precise numbers are impossible to determine but, it's estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 adults and children worldwide are trafficked across international borders annually and made to work under brutal and inhumane conditions.

Human trafficking is defined by Homeland Security as "modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act."

Nurses are more likely to come in contact with human trafficking victims during the time of their exploitation than any other profession, but very few are identified by staff and helped to find safety according to Johnson & Johnson Notes on Nursing. 

Danielle Jordan Bastein, an ER Nurse at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan created a new screening protocol to help identify trafficked individuals. She says more than 90% of trafficked victims have some type of contact with health care workers, but fewer than 1% has been identified in a health care setting.

She told a local Detroit news station how the screening protocol worked. "It is a multiple step process and it involves mostly nurses," she said. "What happens is, as soon as you make contact to our area you go through triage. Based on the education the Nurses have, and also the Physicians, and they are triaging this patient and they say, you know what, something doesn't seem right, I am going to flag them."

Once the patient has been flagged, the primary Nurse is alerted and conducts another assessment with specific questions.

Some signs Danielle points out include "A lot of the things we look for is an inconsistent story," she said. "If there is abuse, torture or neglect signs with that person; if they aren't holding their own ID or money. If the person with them is refusing to leave while they answer or is answering questions for them."

"If the person is identified as a victim of human trafficking and agrees to receive help, authorities are alerted and they are given safe housing, necessities and transportation."

As of January 24, 2019 the news station said Danielle's program has saved 17 victims so far and she hopes other hospitals will implement her screening. 

We applaud Danielle’s initiative and creativity because she devised a very useful tool to help identify these victims. You can also find training at SOAR (Stop, Observe, Ask, Respond)  https://www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/training/soar-to-health-and-wellness-training. Soar is jointly provided by Postgraduate Institute for Medicine, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families, Office on Trafficking in Persons and Office on Women’s Health.

Resources:

If you know of human trafficking or are a victim, call The National Human Trafficking Hotline (888) 373-7888.

You can also text at 233733, text "help" or "info" hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week. The website: humantraffickinghotline.org.

Join Us in Celebrating the Foundation of the National Student Nurses' Association 50th Anniversary by Supporting Nursing Education! 

Get involved and help us double the 3M™ Littmann® Stethoscopes Grant!

3M™ Littmann® Stethoscopes is providing a $50,000 grant to the Foundation. Double the impact! Help us turn $50,000 into $100,000 to support the education of future nurses! 

To make a donation, please click the “Donate Here” link…

Donate Here 

As you know, Nursing is a demanding profession that requires a lot of dedication and commitment. The field has challenges that you must constantly work to overcome.

Professional Responsibility

You hold legal responsibility for all patients under your care. If a physician gives an incorrect
order, you won’t be absolved of the blame if you carry it out. This requires you to be fully aware of the risk of each order, prescription, and treatment you provide.

Workplace Safety

Nurses face a number of workplace safety issues. According to an AJC article, depending on the setting in which you work, Nurses can also be subject to substantially higher rates of workplace violence injuries than many other professions. They're more likely to experience incidents of hitting, kicking and beating in inpatient facilities such as hospitals, but these injuries often go unreported.

Short Staffing

Beckers Hospital Review discusses short-staffing in hospitals as a top concern for Nurses. The article says, "A 2017 survey conducted by AMN Healthcare showed 72 percent of CNOs acknowledged moderate, significant or severe nursing shortage at their healthcare organizations, and most believe the shortages would worsen over the next five years. Overall, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates more than 1 million registered nurses will be needed by 2022 due to occupational growth and replacement hiring. It’s worth noting, other research shows variation among the nation's major metropolitan areas, with some facing nursing shortages and others facing surpluses."

Changing Technology

Technology is always changing. The challenge is to stay ahead of it. CNO’s, nurse managers, and floor nurses must stay up to date with technology and adopt the systems that improve patient care. Nurses must be trained in the new technology, whether it is enhanced EMR/EHR, patient glucose monitors, patient scheduling systems, or software platforms that enhance patient/family/provider communication.

Long Working Hours

Nurses are often required to work long shifts. Many are working back-to-back or extended shifts, risking fatigue that could result in medical mistakes.

Healthcare is constantly changing. As you know, it’s your duty to navigate through the workload and responsibility the best you can. If you have some tips to share on how you handle these changes, please comment below.

Illness is blind to race, gender and ethnic origins. Since you are in the business of caring for others, it's critically important to ensure that clinicians, executives and even members of the governing boards, accurately represent the communities you serve. 

There is room for considerable improvement in leadership diversity in healthcare. According to AMN Healthcare, A survey by American Hospital Association’s Institute for Diversity in Healthcare Management found that while minorities represented 32% of patients in hospitals, they comprised only 14% of hospital board members, 11% of executive leadership, and 19% of mid-level and first-level managers. On gender, despite a healthcare workforce that is 80% female, women occupy approximately 25% of hospital CEO positions. Representation by women of color is in the single digits.

There are clear benefits of promoting diversity in the C-suite and encouraging stronger representation from groups that have long been underrepresented in executive roles. Not only do patients benefit from having advocates who represent the full spectrum of the community, but it also makes good business sense. 

Having a variety of opinions and perspectives among top leadership ranks leads to deeper discussions, more thoughtful and intentional strategies, and better decision-making. That, in turn, improves operational performance.

Diversity can be a competitive advance in recruiting, hiring, and retaining quality Nurses, Physicians and other healthcare professionals, including leaders. Like patient engagement, the engagement of team members and leaders is crucial to recruitment and retention, so diversity should be an important consideration to make all feel welcome.

Healthcare systems are aware that diversity among staff, leadership and board members is important to improving patient medical outcomes and reducing health disparities. Diversity also improves the bottom line. Companies with the most ethnically diverse executive teams are 33% more likely to outperform peers on profitability, according to McKinsey & Co.

Healthcare organizations should pursue diversity in their leadership and workforce to improve healthcare outcomes and their bottom line. 

The eight-minute film, titled Purl, emphasizes the importance of workplace inclusivity and diversity. Writer and director, Kristen Lester, used her own experiences in the animation industry for Purl's story. 

“It’s based on my experience being in animation”, says Lester, “my first job, I was like the only woman in the room and so in order to do the thing that I loved, I sort of became one of the guys. Then, I came to Pixar and I started to work on teams with women for the first time and that actually made me realise how much of the female aspect of myself I had sort of buried and left behind”.

This film emphasizes complaints about male-dominated industries and how they're still way behind in terms of hiring diverse teams, publicly reporting those figures, and properly onboarding a new employee. HR managers believe those things are key to preventing toxic or alienating work cultures. 

Watch Purl's first day at B.R.O Capital, below! 

Over the past few years, themed escape rooms have become a top team-building event. Nurses are taking this idea and creating their own escape room concepts to improve healthcare professionals' knowledge and skills. 

Nurses Paula M. Gabriel, MSN-RN, and Casey Lieb, MSN-RN at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center created a sepsis awareness escape room.

A variety of healthcare professionals signed up online including Social Workers, Physical Therapists, Physicians, Nursing Assistants, Nursing Students, members of the Infection Prevention Team, and more.

According to a HealthLeaders article, teams of six to eight people were locked in the Penn Presbyterian sepsis escape room together and asked to complete a mission. The teams had 25 minutes to detect and treat sepsis in a mock patient before they could escape the room. They did this by solving four puzzles and responding to clues. At the end of the either completed or failed mission, the teams debriefed with Gabriel and Lieb who informally evaluated the participants' understanding of sepsis.

"The escape room format allows different types of learning, so you have people that are auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learners [and] they can touch things and talk through things. You have to use your critical-thinking skills and think outside the box," Gabriel says. "There's that pressure element of having to escape something in a certain amount of time and you know it's a different way of learning, compared to the traditional, ‘Come and sit in a classroom' and have somebody give you information."

The University at Buffalo School of Nursing and School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences built an escape room to improve Nursing and Pharmacy students teamwork and communication. 

“Communication is critical between Nurses and Pharmacists because both professionals have key information about patients that, when combined, can enhance the care that patients receive,” said Nicholas Fusco, PharmD, Clinical Associate Professor.

According to a University of Buffalo news release, The escape room with Patient X, features riddles, puzzles, combination locks and invisible ink. The game highlights critical lessons surrounding infection control, patient restraint and medication safety.

Participants will complete a survey after the simulation, regardless of whether they completed the escape room. The results will help the researchers determine the effectiveness of team building exercises on performance and perceptions surrounding teamwork in interprofessional training.

University of Arizona College of Medicine added an escape room to their curriculum. 

Third-year medical students teamed up with physical therapy, occupational therapy and physician assistant students from Northern Arizona University to solve cases that involve rare diseases and bioterrorism. The scenario featured a terrorist who accidently exposed himself to his chemical/biological agent. Students had to figure out which agent he was exposed to and decide how to treat him in under 30 minutes.  

“The purpose of the escape room was to create a situation with external pressure that helps us observe how these students work in teams,” Lee Anne Denny, MD, director of Interprofessional Education, said. “Pressure to perform can cause teams to behave differently and sometimes unhelpful behaviors can emerge. This provides an opportunity to reflect on teamwork skills in a safe setting.”

Have you tried an escape room at your school or place of work? Was it a great learning experience that you would recommend? We would love to hear from you, comment below!

Dealing with the passing of a patient can be very difficult. There are many coping mechanisms you can use during these difficult times. It is best to face the emotions instead of avoiding them and be open with yourself and fellow team members. 

According to an article on boardvitals.com, avoidance and emotional distance can exacerbate stress. Even when the situation makes withholding one’s emotions appropriate, doing so will take its toll on you. It can compound the sense of loss. "Nurses who don’t allow themselves to process grief may feel reluctant to get close to other patients, have difficulty with personal relationships or have trouble sleeping or eating properly" said, Robert S. McKelvey, MD, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University.

Try speaking with colleagues and friends. Most likely, they’ve been in a similar state of mind or had an experience like yours at some point in their career. From those experiences, they can give you advice on how they coped with the loss of a patient. Speaking to someone who has gone through it should help you feel better. If you feel you need more help, a mental health professional can help you through the grieving process.

Praying or meditating is a practical way of clearing the worries and sorrow from your mind. Perhaps this is a better method to give you the peace of mind you can’t get from other people.

Spending time outdoors or exercising can improve your mood as well. Activities like gardening, yoga, swimming, running or walking can potentially give you peace and relax your mind. 

Don't blame yourself or try to find a reason why. Death is a part of life. You are human and did your best to save their life. Your patient's death does not define your skill, abilities or your character.

Every situation is unique. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with death. Take time to reflect and process the experience in your own way. Most of all, take care of you so you can take care of others. You are awesome!

If you have any advice on this topic, please share it here. Thank you.

According to a Becker's Hospital Review article, 24 hospitals are participating in the country's first city-led Nurse residency program, they are:

• BronxCare Health System
• Brookdale University Hospital
• Interfaith Medical Center
• Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center
• Mount Sinai Brooklyn
• Mount Sinai Hospital
• Mount Sinai Queens
• Mount Sinai St. Luke’s
• Mount Sinai West
• Maimonides Medical Center
• NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist
• NewYork-Presbyterian Queens
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Bellevue
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Coney Island
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Elmhurst
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Harlem
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Jacobi
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Kings County
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Lincoln
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Metropolitan
• NYC Health + Hospitals-North Central Bronx
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Queens
• NYC Health + Hospitals-Woodhull
• St. Barnabas Hospital Systems