One of the next greatest challenges that the US health care system faces is the aging of the baby boomers. The year 2011 marks the year that the first baby boomer turns 65. Before 20 years are up there will be over 70 million people that are 65 or older. As people age, they usually […]
Go Red for Women on February 4th! National Wear Red Day was instituted by the American Heart Association in an effort to help save women’s lives. Too many women die each year unaware that heart disease is their number one killer. One in three women die from heart disease which means that almost one woman […]
On January 12, 2010 a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and took the lives of 230,000 people and injured more than 300,000. More than one million Haitians were left homeless. One year later, Haitians are still trying to recover. In the aftermath of this horrific quake, more than a million Haitians […]
I am an RN in Virginia. I, too, have seen our LPNs being phased out. In fact, I believe our floor has the highest percentage of LPNs in the entire hospital. When I graduated nursing school in 2007 and began my career, I was trained by a seasoned RN. However, during the nights when I […]
In the next few years, we will look back at 2010 and remember it as the year that healthcare began to change. The issues in nursing have been just as important and profound. 2010 had the leaders in nursing fighting to ensure nurses’ involvement as healthcare goes through many changes. Following is a sampling of […]
Licensed practical nursing (in some states called licensed vocational nursing) has a noble history dating back to the early 1940’s. This category of nursing began as a way to get licensed caregivers into the workforce in a shorter period of time than it took registered nurses. This was particularly important after WWII when many RNs […]
In the days since a massive earthquake in Haiti on January 12 left tens of thousands dead and thousands more wounded, tens of thousands of U.S. Nurses have offered their assistance. If Haitians are ever going to recover from this devastation, they are going to need nurses, and lots of them. Haiti’s health-care infrastructure has […]
Health insurance scams are on the rise as criminals quickly take advantage of consumers’ confusion about how the new health care law changes their insurance coverage. Earlier this year, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warned state insurance commissioners about new schemes to sell bogus insurance policies. Just last week, HHS gave […]
The American Heart Association (AHA) has issued some revised guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for both lay and professional rescuers. The recommended sequence of CPR steps is changing from airway-breathing-compressions to compressions-airway-breathing. This change will apply to adults, children and infants but excludes newborns. The former approach which began with tilting a victims head back […]
Prescription drug abuse is the nation’s fastest growing drug problem and our teenagers are right in the middle of it. The government reports that more than three million teens have abused prescription drugs. The majority of the teens are getting them right out of their own medicine cabinets. Seven out of ten kids say that […]
