Well, truth be told, I think you should be nice to a nurse every month, but maybe more so in May. In the United States, 2009’s National Nurses Week is from May  6 to 12 and in Canada, it’s from May 11 to 17.
Where I work as a clinical resource nurse, I had some good plans for the week, but they fell by the wayside because of pandemic preparation and a lot of other work. On the other hand, because I’m in Canada, I have an extra week to see if we can manage something. The goal is to recognize …read more

This made me sit up and take notice since I used to work nights in the hospital…
The graveyard shift is the worst time to call code blue, a new study finds. Patients who go into cardiac arrest while in the hospital are more likely to die if it happens after 11 p.m., when staffing may be lower or patients are watched less closely.
The ER is the only place that there was no difference in death rates. Among day shifts in all other units hospital wide the success rate of patients that cardiac arrested was 20% and the night shift …read more

Suffering from cardiac arrest while staying in a hospital might be more deadly than receiving such a fit at a crowded airport, according to a new study.
Being a nurse, I find this hard to believe. I would think that we would respond quicker and get CPR and an ET tube in place quicker than an innocent bystander looking for the AED on the wall. I can not remember more than a 3-4 minute lag or down time for any code situation that I have ever personally been involved in. And what if the person needs to be trached or …read more

Today at Genetics and Health, I’ve got an interview with ER nurse Kim McAllister of Emergiblog. In the interview, we talked about Beatrice Vance, the woman who died of a heart attack while waiting in her local hospital’s emergency room. Come take a look to see what Kim thinks of the tragic situation.