DiversityNursing Blog

By LIANNA SERKO

School of Nursing graduates of the class of 2012 saw a significant increase in employment over the class of 2011.

The Career Plans Survey, released by Career Services, revealed that 75 percent of Nursing School graduates obtained full-time employment, a major increase from 59 percent full-time employment for graduates of the class of 2011.

This placed Nursing School graduates second behind Wharton graduates in full-time employment among the four undergraduate schools in 2012. Graduates of the Wharton School reported 84.6 percent full-time employment, while Engineering and College graduates reported 67.8 percent and 57 percent, respectively.

Sharon Fleshman, senior associate director at Career Services for the Nursing School, suggests the increase in full-time employment may be a reflection of a strengthening employment market for nurses with bachelor of science in nursing degrees, which had slowed down after the recession of 2009-2010.

“Over the past several years, there has been an issue with the job market for our new graduate nurses. Based on the recession, there has been less retirement and less turnover with registered nurses, with nurses coming back to the workforce,” she said. “There are a lot of dynamics that might have fed into the job market as it is.”

In regard to the seeming strength of the current job market for Nursing graduates, Fleshman noted increased efforts by Career Services as a causal element for higher employment rates. The department now places a heavier emphasis on networking and encourages students to connect with nurse managers, evidenced by the 2011 creation of Nurse Manager Panels, which make nurse managers more accessible to and approachable by Nursing students.

Contact with nurse managers allows students to “make the most of their clinical rotations,” which may lead to a more secure path to employment.

The response rate to the career plans survey decreased from 85 percent in 2011 to 72 percent in 2012.

The average starting salary decreased marginally from $56,665 in 2011 to $56,051 in 2012, with both of these numbers reflecting a substantial decrease from the average starting salary of $60,325 reported in 2010.

The number of Nursing graduates attending graduate school also dropped considerably from 26 percent in 2011 to only 9 percent in 2012, a statistic likely correlated to the higher employment rate, according to Rose and Fleshman.

“Many Penn Nursing students eventually do plan on going back to school, but I do think going to school right after undergraduate is impacted by the job market,” Fleshman said.

The remaining statistics closely mirror those of previous years.

The vast majority of Nursing graduates who found full-time employment will work in Pennsylvania, with 19 graduates working for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. This may be a result of the clinical rotations that are part of the Nursing degree program. Additionally, 64 percent found employment in the Mid-Atlantic region, down from 70 percent in 2011.

Of the students surveyed, only 6 percent are still actively seeking employment, a statistic similar among the other undergraduate schools, with 7 percent of College graduates, 5 percent of Engineering graduates, and 5.5 percent of Wharton graduates also seeking employment at the time of the survey.

“Every year we hope we’ll get our job market back to where it was,” Fleshman said.

By Brittney Edwards

Frontier Nursing University has been awarded a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Scholarship for Disadvantaged Students (SDS) program. This four-year grant totals $1,350,000 and will provide scholarships to 90 students over the grant period.

The purpose of the SDS Program is to increase diversity in the health professions and nursing workforce by providing grants to eligible health professions and nursing schools for use in awarding scholarships to financially needy students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many of these students are from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds and will help diversify the health workforce. Because 100% of FNU graduates are trained in primary care, the FNU student body is a precise fit with the goals of the SDS program. Not only does Frontier recruit, educate and graduate advanced practice nurses and midwives to work in primary care, but our university targets students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds and minority groups. With over 60% of FNU students fitting the educationally disadvantaged category and 20% qualifying as economically disadvantaged, FNU has a pool of students who can benefit greatly from this assistance.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer these scholarships to our students who might have had their graduate education goals postponed or unfulfilled because of financial constraints,” said Dr. Susan Stone, FNU President and Dean. “Our mission is to educate nurse-midwives and nurse practitioners to serve women and families with a focus on rural and underserved areas, so the SDS grant is a perfect fit with our institutional goals.”

FNU will award 90 scholarships, valued at $15,000 each, over the four-year grant period. FNU tuition for the entire program, if attending full-time, ranges from $24,000 to $31,000. This low tuition will allow FNU to award nearly full scholarships for tuition with some funding for fees, books and reasonable living expenses. This funding will make the difference to students experiencing financial difficulties and allow them to complete their graduate education.

Not Holuba. She’s different. She’s a nursing student in the pediatric nurse practitioner program at Johns Hopkins University, but she’s also a classically trained soprano whose soaring voice can transport her listeners far beyond the sterile confines of a hospital or clinic.

In between classes and studying, Holuba dons the fanciful gowns of fairytale characters and performs for pediatric patients and their families. Sometimes she gives them a full-on presentation, complete with storytelling and grand gestures and songs. And sometimes, she sits next to a child, holds her hand, and quietly croons her to sleep. She takes her cues from the children.

Either way, she is grateful for the chance to use her gift to help sick children feel better. Even just for the length of a song.

“It’s a great thing to see my dream of fusing my passions--nursing and music--happen,” said Holuba, 23.

As a little girl in New Jersey, Holuba spent many hours visiting a young relative in the hospital, which gave her some natural comfort with the hospital environment. Later, as a teenager, she participated in high school and community theater, honing her performing skills. Remembering her own family’s experience, Holuba called up the local children’s hospital and asked if she could come entertain the children.

She had a calling.

When she was a sophomore in high school, her father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Over the years, he received treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, including three different stem cell transplants. As she observed his nurses at work, the idea of a possible career in nursing was first planted.

Holuba eventually went on to major in psychology at Columbia University, graduating in three years. Then she enrolled in the accelerated BSN program at Johns Hopkins. She even recorded a CD of beloved Christmas songs, at her father’s encouraging.

“He really loved it,” Holuba said. “He took full credit for it being his idea…We played it for him that last Christmas, and it was really great to see his smile while it was on.” She was privileged to spend some time with her father before he died in January 2012.

After returning to school, she finished her BSN during the summer and began her current master’s degree program.

In Baltimore, Holuba had discovered Dr. Bob’s Place, a palliative-care home for terminally ill infants and children. Ever since that discovery, she has committed herself to weekly visits. Even when she’s trying to juggle all the demands of her program, she always finds time to visit the children.

“I make the time for this as if it were a job,” she said. “It’s really important to me, and I know how much it means to the families. I’ve been that family member where the hours can’t pass quickly enough.”

She loves seeing the children respond to her costume and to the music. She always takes requests from the young patients. She’s equally enthusiastic about slightly off-key group renditions of “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” as she is about the big Broadway-style numbers that she performs. And when children ask her to sing songs that she doesn’t know, she just encourages the children to teach them to her.

“It’s always fun to make music with them.”

She sees them as children who love music and singing and dancing, not just “sick kids.” “I think that’s a nice change for them,” she said.

With all of her experience, Holuba believes strongly in the value of good end-of-life care and palliative care. Many people don’t want to talk about death or dying, but she realizes it is part of the life process. She hopes to continue exploring her devotion to helping people at such a vulnerable time in their lives.

Her future will certainly include music, too. This spring, Holuba plans to begin visiting the pediatric patients at Johns Hopkins, in addition to Dr. Bob’s. She’ll also continue her course work, with her dream of becoming a pediatric nurse practitioner still in mind. She’s considering a future working with children with cancer in an outpatient setting.

“It’s really just about sharing the music and sharing the time,” she said.

The American Nurse Project-- 60 second trailer from American Nurse Project on Vimeo.

This is a videon trailer you will want to see.

Article from CareerBuilder.com

The nursing shortage often lamented by policymakers and health care professionals appears to have eased during the recession, but experts warn that demand for nurses will rise sharply in the coming years. New data from the federal government appears to bear that out, showing that the nursing field is likely to add jobs rapidly over the coming decade.

That's according to employment projections released earlier this year by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Of the 30 occupations that will see the largest gain in new jobs between 2010 and 2020, six are in nursing. Registered nurses are at the very top of the list, with more new jobs projected than any other occupation. Home and personal care aides are poised for astronomical growth (around 70 percent), reflecting the large numbers of elderly people likely to need these services. 

These big gains follow the trend for the health care industry overall. The BLS projects that health care practitioners (a group that includes physicians, registered nurses, health technologists and others) will see the second-largest number of new jobs among all occupational groups: 2 million between 2010 and 2020, adding jobs at a rate of 25.9 percent. Health care support jobs (a category that includes personal care and home health aides, among others) will see the fastest growth of any occupational group: 1.4 million jobs between 2010 and 2020, at a rate of 34.5 percent.

The list below features six nursing jobs poised for major growth.

1. Registered nurses
Number of new jobs: 711,900
Growth rate: 26 percent
Overall rank (in number of new jobs created, among all occupations): 1
What they need: To complete a bachelor's degree in nursing, an associate degree in nursing or a diploma, plus pass a licensure exam
What they do: Treat and educate patients under the supervision of physicians, in a wide variety of health care settings

2. Home health aides
Number of new jobs: 706,300
Growth rate: 69.4 percent
Overall rank: 3
What they need: To complete a minimum 75-hour training program and pass a test or state certification exam
What they do: Provide basic nursing care for elderly and other needy patients in their homes

3. Personal care aides
Number of new jobs: 607,000
Growth rate: 70.5 percent
Overall rank: 4
What they need: To complete a training program
What they do: Perform duties similar to home health aides, but with a focus on household help, bathing and dressing

4. Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants
Number of new jobs: 302,000
Growth rate: 20.1 percent
Overall rank: 11
What they need: Vocational or on-the-job training, plus certification requirements that vary by state and type of health care facility
What they do: Provide routine, hands-on care in a range of health care settings such as hospitals and nursing care facilities

5. Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses
Number of new jobs: 168,500
Growth rate: 22.4 percent
Overall rank: 28
What they need: To complete a one-year training program and pass a licensure exam
What they do: Care for patients under the supervision of registered nurses and physicians

6. Medical assistants
Number of new jobs: 162,900
Growth rate: 30.9 percent
Overall rank: 30
What they need: To complete a one- or two-year training program, either at a community college or vocational school, or on the job
What they do: Perform a range of clinical and administrative tasks in offices of physicians and other health care practitioners

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.

Anyone who has been in the nursing field for an extended period of time will tell you that a lot has changed. In fact, the twentieth century brought – literally – a technological “invasion” to nursing. 

According to Kaplan Nursing, from small advances, like digital thermometers, to sophisticated strides, like laser surgery, health care as a whole has been on quite a rollercoaster - and nurses have been along for the ride.

Medical advancements and information technologies of the twentieth century have not only changed the face of the nursing – they have become part of the intricate fabric of the field. 

But what are the technologies responsible for this monumental transformation?

One nursing professional – and author of a site called The Nurse Lady- offers these 19 technologies that changed nursing forever.

1.Electronic IV monitors

There was a time when IVs had to be administered with a nurse’s constant attention to ensure a steady flow. Manual IVs were highly sensitive to a patient’s movement and the flow of the IV could be sped up or slowed to a crawl by a subtle movement. To prevent this, nurses had to directly administer an IV from beginning to start. With the advent of IV pump infusion and electronic monitoring, nurses are freed up to initiate an IV and allow a machine to monitor and regulate the process. If there is an error, the system tries to correct it, and otherwise contacts the nurse via remote monitoring.

2.The Sphygmomanometer

The sphygmomanometer is simply a fancy term for electronic blood pressure cuffs that also measure heart beat rate automatically. Gone are the days when a nurse had to measure blood pressure manually. According to one nurse, this is the technological change that makes the biggest daily difference.

3.Information management

As computer technologies become the primary means of managing patient information, nurses have had to adapt their record-keeping practices and increase their computer skills. Nursing informatics is a specialty that has emerged, combining IT skills and nursing science.

4.The portable defibrillator

Manual CPR can only do so much and for the longest time this was the only method available to many nurses for reviving someone’s heart. Now, even school nurses stand a fighting chance to save the life of a person whose heart has failed. The few minutes after heart failure are critical, and the portable defibrillator allows for immediate resuscitative action.

Sturdy, portable IT devices

Tablet computers and mobile wireless computer stations are now a standard part of the day-to-day methods of delivering care to patients. Charts are updated continuously, in real time, providing nurses with immediate access to essential patient information.

6.Readily accessible base of information

Wireless Internet connections quickly make reference materials available. This can prove very helpful for diagnosis, especially when using a resource like WebMD.

7.The sonogram/ultrasound

Ultrasound devices provide nurses working with pregnant patients the ability to see inside the womb. Ultrasound has been nothing short of revolutionary in the field of Women’s Health and pregnancy, allowing nurses and doctors to noninvasively identify the health of the baby throughout pregnancy. Now, with the advent of 4-D ultrasound, unprecedented detail is available for diagnosing fetal well-being. In addition to pregnancy monitoring, sonogram technology also offers many other new diagnostic advances such as the ability to easily identify cancer tumors in the bladder, and to tell whether the liver is enlarged.

8.Local wireless telephone networks

These systems significantly reduce communication delays. Not only is this type of communication technology being utilized between nursing staff, but also between patients and staff, changing the dynamics of the relationship between patients and their nurses.

9.Hands-free communication devices

Hands-free devices such as Vocera’s Call Badge provide the ultimate in communication while a nurse is engaged in active patient care or associated tasks.

10.Communications options

It is not uncommon for patients and nurses (and doctors) to communicate via e-mail or even web cam; a practice that is becoming common for parents of children in neo-natal intensive care units.

11.Patient remote monitoring

In addition to high-tech and ultra-sensitive vital signs monitoring equipment, web cams and other technologies make the close monitoring of multiple patients much easier, changing how environments are staffed and operated.

12.RFID technologies

RFID-enabled devices make monitoring hospital assets easier, ranging from drugs and equipment to records and patients. They also enhance safety and security with less effort and lower long-term cost.

13.Compact, portable medical devices

Combined with portable IT and communication equipment, these small, high-tech types of devices allow well-equipped nurses to take their skills on the road. They can travel to patients’ homes and treat conditions that once had to be treated on an in-patient basis.

Neo-natal nursing advancements

New, more affordable portable devices for the care of tinier and more health-compromised babies.

15.Drug management technologies

High-tech systems of medication retrieval and delivery, such as bar coding and verification, have greatly reduced the potential for dangerous error. Infusion equipment advances have made the delivery of slow-administer drugs much easier, with computerized machines able to control dosages and rates.

16.Configurable nursing environments

Configurable work spaces increases efficiency and safety, reduces stress, and prevents accidents and injuries.

17.Learning technologies

The availability of individual and off-site learning opportunities and degree programs, via specialized software and online classes, allows for more rapid career advancement.

18.Video conferencing

The ability to interact with nursing professionals throughout the world, through such means as video conferencing, offers advantages and opportunities like never before, both in terms of the further development of the nursing profession and the continued improvement in patient care outcomes.

19.The blogosphere 

Medical technologies have brought changes to the process of life and death and the role of the nurse. The Internet allows nurses to share their experiences and feelings. As technology transforms the profession, nurses adapt and change as well. The big question is: What will the rest of the twenty-first century bring?