Nurse Mentor

A recent Kaiser Health News article highlights one of my personal pet peeves about hospital care: Unnecessarily interrupted sleep during hospitalization. It is bad for the patient and certainly impacts their satisfaction with your care. You know how you feel when you haven't slept well, right? Add illness to that and for some, aging changes and you end up with a cranky patient and often family to boot.  Sleep is important for all when ill, no matter what age the patient. Sleep helps you heal.  It allows your body to work on fixing the problem while the mind switches to different activity levels that allow for physiologic healing to occur. Sick kids need it so they have the energy to cope with their illness during the day and all those grown ups doing stuff to them. The elderly need sleep because it will take them longer to recover.  Lack of sleep also puts them at higher risk for delirium, confusion, and wandering. (Oh, does that explain a few things?!) So if ...

Social media recently tuned me into a great resource every nurse with loans should know about: Student loan repayment through volunteer work.  SponsorChange  is a non-profit committed to helping people repay their student loans. Here's why it is a better option for you than working a second job to repay those loans.  And yes, I know many of you do. 1) Working more than three 12 hour shifts a week is bad for your health and your patients. More and more research shows that 12 hour shifts are bad for you .  How come?  Let's think about it. The shift starts at 7am.  You're up at 5:30 or 6 so you can commute and get there on time unless you live within a short walk to your job, which most people do not in the US.  So your day really starts at 5:30am. You work all day long and give report, which ideally means you finish report at 7:30pm and then you leave.  But that never happens right?  So, you stay to finish up everything and maybe get pa...