DiversityNursing Blog

Question:

Dear Donna,

I'm a recent new graduate and I'm trying to figure out how to setup and update my resume to be more attractive to employers. Are there certain topics or headlines that should be included and what are the rules for putting my clinical experience on
my resume?

Wants a More Attractive Resume 

One of our fellow nurses needs some help dealing with racism in the workplace. Do you have any advice or experiences that will help her out?:

"How do you deal with racist comments directed toward yourself from patients? I've experienced racist attitudes before, but never verbalized comments in a derogatory manner from a patient until this week. Naturally I felt very down for a few hours afterward and I continue to think about it. It wasn't the negativity toward me per se, it was the thought that there could be more people out there thinking/feeling the same animosity toward me over something I cannot control, my phenotype. I take pride in my cultural heritage and wonder how anyone cannot see the beauty in diversity. I also thought that because they are sick they let their true thoughts out. Could any healthy person walking around be feeling the same thing but be inhibited from making it known? Then I thought of the people who could be dealing with this on a regular basis. How do you deal?"

By Joyce Pellino Crane

When Diana Walker-Moyer left her Westford home on the morning of April 15 to volunteer at the Boston Marathon, she had no idea that her nursing skills would thrust her into the first known and widespread terrorist attack in this northeast region since 9/11.

According to Walker-Moyer, there were two medical tents set up at the marathon. Medical tent A was located at the finish line, and medical tent B was sited further down the road at Berkley Street near St. James, she said. Inside were emergency room physicians, intensive care unit nurses, and emergency medical technicians.

       Walker-Moyer was asked to oversee a team of 15 health care providers charged with scanning the throngs for light-headed runners as they arrived. Her zone stretched along Boylston Street from a point between Clarendon and Dartmouth Streets toward Berkley.

       The trickle of elite runners moving past her at the beginning of the race, swelled to a sea of bodies, as the slower runners finished the race.

       “It’s like swimming in a sea of lemmings,” she said. “There are so many faces.”

       According to the BAA, 23,336 began the race and 17,580 finished.

       Her role was to keep people moving toward a supply of water bottles, Mylar blankets and the medals for finishers. Some team members stood by with wheelchairs in case a runner fainted.

       “People are running this whole time and their heart is circulating the blood and so are their leg muscles,” Walker-Moyer said. “Then when they stop, that leg action muscle no longer is working the same because they’ve stopped moving and they may not be getting as much blood flow to their head.”

       When the first explosion occurred on Boylston between Exeter and Dartmouth Streets, she was walking with a runner. Everyone turned to look. It sounded like a cannon, she said. “But there was no reason for that to happen right then. It made no sense,” Walker-Moyer said.

       “Then the second one went off,” she said. “We were probably 100 yards away from it. Then you have all these people going from joy-faced to sad-faced because they’re in pain.” The second bomb was detonated 13 seconds later in front of the Forum Restaurant between Exeter and Fairfield Streets.

       Medical tent A quickly became a triage center for the wounded.

       “Thank God those people were there because more people would have died just from blood loss,” said Walker-Moyer. “The response was rapid and appropriate and lives were saved.”

       As three police officers rushed past her toward the finish line, Walker-Moyer stayed at her post moving runners forward, said Collins.

“Diana was part of the medical sweep teams at the finish line, helping to move runners away from harm’s way after the explosions occurred,” Collins said.

       Next year she’ll do it all over again, Walker-Moyer said.

       “It’s Patriots’ Day. You think of the citizens who went to fight (in 1775) and we have this citizens medical group who are trained to volunteer when there’s a crisis,” she said. “One of the strengths of our nation has to be a prepared citizenry.”

Source: Wicked Local - Westford 

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.
NYTimes.com

 
When a book is heavy with glossy photographs, you seldom expect too much from its words. In “The American Nurse,” though, it’s the narrative that hits you in the solar plexus.

Take the comments of Jason Short, a hospice nurse in rural Kentucky. Mr. Short started out as an auto mechanic, then became a commercial trucker. “When the economy went under,” he says, “I thought it would be a good idea to get into health care.” But a purely pragmatic decision became a mission: Mr. Short found his calling among the desperately ill of Appalachia and will not be changing careers again.

“Once you get a taste for helping people, it’s kind of addictive,” he says, dodging the inspirational verbiage that often smothers the healing professions in favor of a single incontrovertible point.
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Some of the 75 nurses who tell their stories in this coffee-table book headed into the work with adolescent passion; others backed in reluctantly just to pay the bills. But all of them speak of their difficult, exhilarating job with the same surprised gratitude: “It’s a privilege and honor to do what I do,” says one. “I walk on sacred ground every day.”

They hail from a few dozen health care settings around the country, ranging from large academic institutions like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to tiny facilities like the Villa Loretto Nursing Home in Mount Calvary, Wis., home to 50 patients and a collection of goats, sheep and other animals on a therapeutic farm. Some nurses are administrators, some staff wards or emergency rooms, some visit patients at home. Many are deeply religious, a few are members of the military, and a handful of immigrants were doctors in their home countries.

All describe unique professional paths in short first-person essays culled from video interviews conducted by the photographer Carolyn Jones. Their faces beam out from the book in Ms. Jones’s black-and-white headshots, a few posing with a favorite patient or with their work tools — a medevac helicopter, a stack of prosthetic limbs or a couple of goats.

But even the best photographs are too static to capture people who never stop moving once they get to work. For a real idea of what goes on in their lives, you have to listen to them talk.

Here is Mary Helen Barletti, an intensive care nurse in the Bronx: “My whole life I’ve marched to a the beat of a different drummer. I used to have purple hair, which I’d blow-dry straight up. I wore tight jeans, high heels and — God forgive me — fur (now I am an animal rights activist). My patients loved it. They said I was like sunshine coming into their room.”

Says Judy Ramsay, a pediatric nurse in Chicago: “For twelve years I took care of children who would never get better. People ask how I could do it, but it was the most fulfilling job of my life. We couldn’t cure these kids, but we could give them a better hour or even a better minute of life. All we wanted to do was make their day a little brighter.”

Says Brad Henderson, a nursing student in Wyoming: “I decided to be a nurse because taking care of patients interested me. Once I started, nursing just grabbed me and made me grow up.”

Says Amanda Owen, a wound care nurse at Johns Hopkins: “My nickname here is ‘Pus Princess.’ I don’t talk about my work at cocktail parties.”

John Barbe, a hospice nurse in Florida, sums it up: “When I am out in the community and get asked what I do for a living, I say that I work at Tidewell Hospice, and there’s complete silence. You can hear the crickets chirping. It doesn’t matter because I love what I do; I can’t stay away from this place.”

The volume is not entirely about selfless service: It was underwritten by Fresenius-Kabi, a German health care corporation and leading supplier of intravenous drugs in the United States. Presumably, crass public relations motives lurk somewhere in the background. But that’s no real reason to be meanspirited about the result, a compelling advertisement for an honorable profession.

Young people with kind hearts and uncertain futures might just sit themselves down with the book, or wander through the Web site featuring its video interviews, www.americannurseproject.com, and see what happens.