Nurse Mentor

 Over the years, I've written a lot about pursuing a PhD in nursing and I'm including midwives because we need more PhD prepared midwives too.  Getting a PhD is a great way to address the problems you've seen on the frontlines of COVID-19, another way to address the social injustices of racism and discrimination on health outcomes, and to make your voice heard by the decision-makers. A third of the 1% of nurses with PhDs will retire in the next five years so we need people to take their place. We cannot lose our voices in all the places where nurses and midwives with PhDs work. Here's a compilation of the posts I've written about getting a PhD and the things to think about as you figure out where you want to apply. PhD or DNP?   This is where many people start when trying to decide on their doctoral-level career advancement. This post has my two cents on the topic. Should you work as a nurse before getting a PhD?   There's a lot of opinions out there on this sub...

In case you haven't heard, 2020 is the Year of the Nurse and Midwife as declared by the World Health Organization (WHO)!  This is the first time WHO has taken this action. They chose to do this to help increase support and recognition for nurses and midwives around the world.  Later this year they will also release the state of the world's nursing and midwifery report which will tell us a lot about our colleagues in every country around the world. What's also really cool is we have a way to connect with our colleagues around the world through Nursing Now!, a non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom that is spearheading the global movement to build youth leadership in our profession, make nurses and midwives more visible, and help us all connect together. You can learn more about and join the movement here .

Emergency preparedness nurse expert Tener Veneema, PhD, RN, FAAN provides a great overview for nurses and midwives about the coronavirus COVID-19.

Happy 2019! Much to my surprise, I realized I went all of 2018 without posting anything. I got tenure in 2018 so technically, I should have had more time with that monkey off my back. Yet as a wise colleague told me, tenure usually means more work. Sure enough. Nonetheless, let's start 2019 off fresh with a burning question I get from many of my PhD students: To post-doc or not to post-doc. For those of you not in academia, I post-doctoral fellowship (post-doc) involves additional training. You see, science has evolved so much these days that despite doing a PhD for 4 to 7 years, you might need more training. I went into my post-doc reluctantly. After 5 years of PhD study, I was really hoping to have a just one job and a regular salary that might actually allow me to travel and start paying down my student loans. A post-doc just seemed like more years being poor. It was, however, the best decision I ever made. I was lucky to have a great mentor who passed along many wonderf...

In 2011, some colleagues and I wanted to see what factors might influence someone's choices for going back for a PhD. Our pilot study found some interesting results and you can read about them in our 2014 published study here . Among our findings, family and financial factors were major concerns. This is a pretty common concern among most women returning for graduate study, and increasingly for men. Let's take a look at common questions and concerns around family issues that come up among potential PhD applicants.  Most responses are geared toward individuals returning for full time study and modified for part-time study as needed. These responses also apply to the US context. They may not be relevant outside the US. _______________________________________________________________________________ My family can't afford for me to quit my job for full time study. _____________________________________________________ Full time PhD study is at least a 4 year commitment ...

Congratulations! You've decided to take your career to another level and pursue a research degree. I can assure you that you've not lost your mind (however, you can email me during years 1 and 2 when you're sure you've lost your mind and I'll give you a pep talk), you've just probably come up with more questions that you cannot find answers for in the existing evidence. Even though your undergraduate self that probably did not like your introduction to research course is in shock at the moment, you've made a good choice. So at this moment you're trying to figure out where to go to study. Here's how you should choose.  This is the first post in a series getting published in the Fall of 2015. Do you see yourself doing research just about all the time or maybe part of the time? Just about all of the time = You need to choose a top 25 graduate school that is designated as a Research I university. Most of your time will be spent doing research and l...

This graphic from Nature gives nurses lots to think about. The blue people are the ones for whom the medication actually works well for while the red represents the ones that have bad side effects. How can we encourage adherence to medication regimens with these kinds of facts?

This is a hot topic these days: Should someone be admitted to a PhD program in nursing without ever having worked as a nurse, straight from their bachelor's degree? Good question. A common reaction from most people is that well, of course they should! How can you know what healthcare is like from a nursing perspective if you don't have experience? Of course, one could make the same argument about a PhD in public health where it is also common to go straight from an undergraduate bachelor's degree right into a PhD program. How can you understand the context of public health without any experience? Do we assume that bright people will be able to make reductionistic arguments about their research findings based purely on what trends in numbers show?  In many cases, it happens all the time. Kind of like management consultants with no life or healthcare experience that make recommendations for hospitals and how they should operate. Happens more than you think it does. ...

I've been thinking about this topic for a long time.  It's one where I get the most questions from students about which doctoral degree to do in their future career path. The short answer comes with questions: What do you want to do with your doctoral degree?  Do you want to design and conduct research?  Do you want to focus on applying and testing evidence in clinical practice?  Your answer to that question will determine your educational program choice. Let's start with why you would choose a PhD. Around the world, everyone knows what a PhD is as a degree.  Doesn't matter where you got it from, with a PhD after your name people will recognize you spent a lot of time in school and must have passed some higher standard of educational preparation.   Outside the United States, except for maybe Canada, no one knows what a DNP degree is or what you can do with it.   It will take decades before that happens.  If you think you want a career with an...

Recently I had lunch with a former student who was passing through town. Lisa graduated a little over two years ago and was one of the lucky ones who found a job fairly quickly. What was most interesting about our conversation was the turnover rate on her unit. In 15 months, 15 nurses have left. The most recent was a group of five experienced night shift nurses, the kind any manager is loathe to lose. They left, according to the student, because they were tired of how they were treated.  Lisa is now the most experienced person on night shift at two years out of school. The loss of 15 nurses on one unit has also cost the organization nearly a million dollars. In an era of cost tightening, that is a steep price. Acknowledging that this is only a report from one person, there is still something that rings true in her story: Well managed patient care units do not have high turnover rates of staff. So let's think about what constitutes turnover in nursing staff and it's causes. G...

My favorite shift, evening shift that ran from 3-11:30pm or 4p-12:30am, is disappearing from US hospitals. Evening shift was great.  If morning is not your best time of day, you can be assured that evening shift is your friend.  It gave you time to sleep and refresh from the evening before and attend to life's needs before going to work.  If the shift was crazy, you had time to calm down and still get sleep during normal sleeping hours.  During the shift, it might be admission or post-op care central as patients came in from the ED or back from the OR.  Nurses who worked evening shifts liked them, so you often had a steadier group of co-workers.  Working only 8 hours also meant you had more opportunities to get the same assignment of patients, get to know them, and improve continuity of care. Evening shifts have gone by the wayside because most nurses seem to prefer working 12 hour shifts and management likes them because there is a 4 hour window for extr...

USAID recently published this infographic from their work through the " Deliver Project ".  Their research and program development work adopts a variety of approaches to help people in low and middle-income countries have planned pregnancies. What happens when mothers survive childbirth and can space their pregnancies appropriately? * Children are more likely to live to adulthood and create a sustainable workforce. * Children are more likely to go to school, develop literacy and numeracy skills, and become contributing members to society and economic development. * Children are less likely to grow up with one parent or become orphans because their mothers survive child birth. What's more amazing is we know how to solve these problems.  We have the science and the technology available.  The research-based has captured what we need to do to create behavior change that promotes mother and child survival. Yes, it is complicated and each effort needs to be count...

A new study by my colleague Heather Tubbs-Cooley, PhD, RN out of Cincinnati Children's Hospital demonstrated that better RN to patient ratios mean reduced readmission rates between 15 and 30 days after hospital discharge.   From the study published in the British Medical Journal of Quality & Safety : " Each one patient increase in a hospital's average paediatric staffing ratio increased a medical child's odds of readmission within 15–30 days by a factor of 1.11, or by 11% (95% CI 1.02 to 1.20) and a surgical child's likelihood of readmission within 15–30 days by a factor of 1.48, or by 48% (95% CI 1.27 to 1.73). Children treated in hospitals with paediatric staffing ratios of 1 : 4 or less were significantly less likely to be readmitted within 15–30 days. There were no significant effects of nurse staffing ratios on readmissions within 14 days."   Weaknesses of the study include that it does draw from a dataset of nurse survey responses from four US s...