Nurses donate lottery winnings to colleagues in need
Nurse Watch is compiled in conjunction with the AHA’s American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) and highlights articles of interest to nurse leaders, nursing professionals and other health care leaders. For more about AONE, visit aone.org.
Nurses donate lottery winnings to colleagues in need
Nurses at St. Louis-based Mercy Children’s Hospital won $10,000 in the Mega Millions lottery last month and decided to give their winnings to colleagues who needed it more than they did, CNN reports. The timing was serendipitous: as the NICU nurses, who created the lottery pool to bring levity to their jobs, learned of their winnings, they also learned that a fellow nurse’s son had committed suicide just hours earlier.
They decided to give half of their winnings to their colleague, Gretchen Post, to pay for her son’s funeral, and the other half to a neonatologist whose husband was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year.
"It was a little bit of relief that I would have some money to help with Jack's funeral," Post told the publication. "It just came at the right time."
Nurse staffing more complex than simple ratios
Maintaining safe levels of nurse staffing is more complicated than putting in place simple nurse-to-patient ratios, because such ratios don’t account for patient acuity, cognitive workload or nurse experience, HealthLeaders reports. The publication explores why California’s mandated nurse ratios have not spread to other states and cites previous research on nurse staffing.
Hospitals share physician-nurse partnership experiences
Three hospitals – Catholic Health Initiatives, Englewood, Colo., Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center in Ohio, and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago – shared their strategies for co-leadership by nurse leaders and physician leaders during a forum cosponsored by the American Hospital Association, AONE and the American Association for Physician Leadership. Details about those initiatives are now available in the form of podcasts from the three hospitals.
The organizations also collaborated on a report about clinical partnering between nurse and physician executives. An article about the partnership work was published in the August 2018 issue of Nurse Leader.
Op-ed: Media doesn’t show full scope of nursing
Because of the lack of nurse representation in the media and the way nurses are portrayed in entertainment, the public does not get the full picture of the wide array of nursing roles and the profession’s scientific approach, two nurse educators argue in an Op-ed in The Hill.
“Nurses with advanced degrees are often in leadership roles that may not involve direct patient care but nonetheless are still instrumental in influencing health outcomes for patients, families and communities at large,” write Mallory Bejster, coordinator and instructor of nursing at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg and Janice Phillips, associate professor at Rush University College of Nursing in Chicago.