DiversityNursing Blog

•  "Could you tell me about a time when you interacted with a patient who really needed some spiritual support or attention?"
•  "Please describe your personal definition of spirituality?"
• "How do you see the connection between religion and spirituality?"
• "Could you talk to me about your own comfort in providing spiritual care to critically ill patients?"3
  
  

Taylor summed up many of the study's findings. "Assessing the mind, the body and the soul necessitates the care of spiritual interventions."

References

1.Canfield C et. al. Critical Care Nurses' Perceived Need for Guidance in Addressing Spirituality in Critically Ill Patients. American Journal of Critical Care. May 2016. 25 (3). 206-11.

2. Table 1. Critical Care Nurses' Perceived Need for Guidance in Addressing Spirituality in Critically Ill Patients  http://ajcc.aacnjournals.org/content/25/3/206/T1.expansion.html

3.Table 2. Critical Care Nurses' Perceived Need for Guidance in Addressing Spirituality in Critically Ill Patients  http://ajcc.aacnjournals.org/content/25/3/206/T2.expansion.html

Texas mom Margaret Boemer will have a fascinating story to tell her daughter Lynlee about when she was born.

During her second trimester, Boemer learned during a routine ultrasound that her unborn child had a large tumor growing out of her tailbone. Doctors told her the baby had Sacrococcygeal Teratoma (SCT), a rare birth defect occurring in only one in every 40,000 pregnancies.

“It was a big shock and we were scared,” Boemer told CBS News. “I had just suffered a miscarriage the prior year. To think that I might lose another baby was very hard.”

The large mass was robbing her daughter of blood and would have caused her heart to give out before birth.

But at 20 weeks pregnant, Boemer and her husband Jeff met with doctors at Texas Children’s Fetal Center in Houston, who told her there was an option to perform emergency fetal surgery.

After other specialists advised them to terminate the pregnancy, they decided to move forward with the risky procedure to try to save their baby’s life.

“Lynlee would not have made it without this surgery,” Dr. Darrell Cass of the Texas Children’s Fetal Center told CBS News. With it, she had a 50/50 chance of survival.

At almost 24 weeks, Cass and his team made an incision in Boemer’s abdomen and pulled almost half of Lynlee’s body out of her mother’s uterus to remove the tumor – which was almost larger than the baby herself. Then came the challenge of putting Lynlee back in and closing the uterus. 

“We have to get the tumor away but then we have to make sure the baby can stay safely inside for a number of weeks afterward to have any kind of survival,” Cass said.

After a five-hour procedure, the doctors were able to remove 90 percent of the tumor and safely return Lynlee back inside her mother. Boemer’s uterus was sewn shut and her pregnancy progressed.

Twelve weeks later, Lynlee was essentially born a second time via C-section. At eight days old, she underwent surgery to remove the rest of her tumor. 

Doctors will continue to monitor Lynlee all the way into adulthood. So far she is reaching all her milestones.

“She’s doing great now,” Boemer said. “We’re practicing rolling over.”

It’s an unusual sight in the halls of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Alongside doctors, nurses, and patients, a robot about the size of a washing machine quietly glides through the hospital, a bright light marking its presence.

Dana-Farber executives have high hopes for “Lucy,” one of the newest technologies in use at Boston’s best-known cancer center. Lucy is being developed to deliver prescription drugs directly to patients while they sit in infusion rooms receiving chemotherapy — a treatment that can take many hours. If the system works, it will save patients the time and trouble of having to stand in line to pick up their prescriptions at a pharmacy after an already long and draining day of treatment.

“We want Lucy to be able to improve the patient’s experience while they’re here all day,” said Sylvia Bartel, vice president of pharmacy at Dana-Farber. “Their last stop is usually coming to the outpatient pharmacy and picking up a prescription. They finish their chemotherapy, they have to wait in a line, so we felt like there had to be a way for us to efficiently deliver the [medications] using technology.”

Dana-Farber began testing the technology in 2013, after getting a phone call from executives at Vecna Technologies, the Cambridge-based company that developed the robot and was looking to expand its health care business. The Boston cancer center is one of just a few hospitals in the world using the machine.

Lucy is equipped with a touchscreen, a scanner, and compartments for stocking drugs. There is no attempt to give it human features, other than a voice only used occasionally. For now, the robot doesn’t interact with patients, only with hospital staff. It moves drugs around the Longwood area hospital, making about a dozen trips a day, using Wi-Fi-connected software to open doors and use service elevators.

Lucy isn’t glitch-free. It has ended up on the wrong floor before. On one recent afternoon, its movements were halting. Another day, it was out of service because of a connectivity problem.

Even so, Carlos Verrier, business operations manager in Dana-Farber’s pharmacy, said Lucy has helped make the pharmacy more productive. The hospital pharmacy is a busy place, processing some 400 scrips a day.

“It’s really allowing the staff to do more of what they’re trained to do... and not having to take them away to do a delivery,” Verrier said. “They spend more time on clinical aspects of their job than on delivering medication.”

Deborah Theobald, Vecna’s chief executive, said there’s a lot of potential for using such robots to move sensitive items around a hospital. Robots can move potent, expensive drugs around a building more safely and securely than humans, she said. Their every move can be easily tracked.

Vecna’s QC Bot costs roughly $150,000. Theobald acknowledged that hospital executives may need some persuading before they’re ready to give it a try.

“There’s an education process to get them over the hump and see the [return on investment],” she said. “People really appreciate robots once you get over the education hurdle. People don’t want to go back.”

Anne Tonachel, a former patient and current volunteer at Dana-Farber, has seen Lucy moving around the halls and quickly become a fan.

Tonachel is an ovarian cancer survivor who vividly remembers the pain of receiving chemotherapy treatment for many hours at a time. The treatments left her feeling too sick to pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy. Tonachel said she would have loved to skip that step by having a robot deliver prescriptions directly to her.

“No one would mind having Lucy show up at their bed or chair side,” she said. “In fact, her arrival might add a bit of interest to the day and bring a few smiles.”

A woman who was called 'just a nurse' has sparked a conversation around the world about the value of nursing.

Caitlin Brassington, of Toowoomba, Australia, posted on Facebook that one day last week after work she was in a grocery store, wearing her scrubs, when she ran into an old friend who said she hadn't realized that Brassington was "just a nurse."

"Wow! Over my 18 year career I have heard this phrase many, many time[s], but today it got to me," wrote Brassington, 38, in a now-viral Facebook post that's received more than 19,000 likes.

Brassington went on to gives example of how important nurses are to their patients and communities.

"I have helped babies into the world, many of whom needed assistance to take their first breath, and yet I am just a nurse," she wrote. "I have held patients hands and ensured their dignity while they take their last breath, and yet I am just a nurse. I have counselled grieving parents after the loss of a child, and yet I am just a nurse."

A pediatric nurse who has been in the profession more than nine years, Brassington told ABC News she's "heard this phrase said many times before," but for some reason was moved in this instance to speak out.

The a mother of three added that many don't realize how the role of nurses has evolved over the last 50 years, "particularly with advances in technology and advanced training."

"I think more than ever nurses now have a partnership with doctors and are a vital component of the health care teams," she said.

In the U.S. alone, there are more than 2.7 million nurses, according to 2014 statistics from the United States Department of Labor.

Brassington said her post was on behalf of nurses around the globe.

"It has started a worldwide conversation about how we value and respect certain service industries within communities," she told ABC News. "I think this conversation is long overdue."