Archive for June, 2007

Google announced the creation of a new health advisory board yesterday, as reported on the Google blog. The list of “talented people with extensive backgrounds in health and technology” failed to include a single nurse.
The mission of the board is to “help us better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development.”

In the hospital setting, nurses are often the person that the patient interacts with the most, and so they are uniquely positioned to be able to gather information on problems that healthcare consumers face.

Kim at Emergiblog was one of the first medical bloggers to point this out, urging readers to go to the Google blog and to use the email link to express their concern.

Kevin, MD, another medical blogger points out that there’s “not a lot of youth nor medical bloggers here, which would have been better choices, considering the demographic of the web.”

Another group that expressed dismay over not being included were medical librarians. As Rachel Walden posted in Women’s Health News, “I want to know how a company trying to connect people to health information doesn’t bother to get a few medical librarians on board.”

Google made the announcement yesterday morning and already dozens of healthcare bloggers have been reacting to the news.

Here is the perma-link…

nursinglink.com/news/articles/400-change-of-shift-at-nursinglink

Please spread the word!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am still accepting submissions for Change of Shift. You can send a submission to “beth at pixelrn dot com”, or you can submit it directly to the Blog Carnival Site. Please submit them no later than noon on Wednesday.

This is a very special Change of Shift, as it is the first edition of Volume Two. Also, I will be hosting it over at NursingLink. I think this will be a great way to introduce new readers to the nursing blog community.

It’s been great to see all of you at NursingLink! I’d like to thank all of you who have come over to check us out. As always I am open to any feedback you might have.

Last but not least, I wanted to give a shout out to my favorite NursingLink avatar created thus far, by RN2soon.

NursingLink.com is live!

Come and try it out, fellow nurse bloggers, before the rest of the world gets the official announcement.

Let me know what you think!

Remember this post about the lack of a great centralized nursing web community? Well, it turns out someone else was listening.

I have been hired by Affinity Labs to oversee a new nursing web community!

Affinity Labs is a very exciting company focused on building digital communities. Our founder and CEO, Chris Michel, started Military.com back in 1999, so I’d say he knows a thing or to about building online communities.

NursingLink is the name of this new site and we are preparing to launch it next week. If you are thinking “oh great, another allnurses or nurselinkup” THINK AGAIN!! NursingLink is going to be very different. Why? Because they put a nurse blogger in charge! I have long been scouring the web for interesting nurse-related content and what I have suspected all along is true: Nurse bloggers are producing some of the best, most compelling content for nurses on the web. This means that I will be placing a very heavy emphasis on nurse bloggers at NursingLink.

NursingLink is going to be the essential resource for nurses who wish to network with their colleagues and advance their careers. We are going to feature news updates, discussions, commentaries, product reviews, groups, and member profiles. In addition, we will also be bringing you a searchable training library so you can find CEs/CEUs, training classes, and educational articles. We’ve also partnered with Monster.com to bring you the most healthcare job listings on the web.

Well, I would love to stay and blog but as you can see from the above paragraph, there is much work to be done. I’ll announce it here as soon as we officially launch.

As some of you may have noticed, I have been closely monitoring all nursing and healthcare related news for my other blog, orientedX3.com

One of the things I have noticed is that there is an overwhelming majority of nursing related news articles coming from outside the US. Many of these come from the UK. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is either because (a) smaller American newspapers are not as adept at getting their newsfeeds onto google or (b) UK newspapers are writing more controversial (read: political) things about nurses. After reading this article I am definitely leading towards the latter:

Nurses face £300 bill for parking

NURSES face a £300-a-year bill to park their car at Glasgow hospitals - despite plans to slash proposed charges. Union leaders say nurses are angry over plans to introduce £25-a-month permits at four major sites in the city.

Is this newsworthy? I’ll let the readers decide. It did influence me to immediately calculate exactly how much I pay for parking at the Greatest Hospital Of All Time: $816 a year, which would convert to £414 in UK pounds. I’m not particularly happy about this. But if I were that outraged, I would have the opportunity to vote with my feet, either by attempting to park in the street (and risk getting mugged, getting a ticket, or just plain tardiness); or I could choose to work in a hospital that doesn’t charge employees to park.

There is QUITE a lot more to it than pictures of people drinking out of plastic cups. I spent quite a lot of time (too much time, actually) on Facebook searching for nursing groups and look what I found:

Behind Every Doctor… is a skilled intelligent nurse that saves their ass - 13,976 members

You Know You’re a Nurse When.. - 9031 members

Ten reasons why you should date a nurse
- 4296 members

Be kind to nurses. We keep doctors from accidentally killing you
- 6320 members.
And my favorite:

Nursing makes me drink with a whopping 8695 members. So true, so true.

Just for fun I started my own group, Orientedx3. Please join it! (And yes, you can actually see who I am in my profile. I guess that makes me “out of the closet” as far as blogging goes. I’ll explain later).

Honest to goodness quote from the pediatrician today: “You might have to trim his hair in the back if you don’t want him to have a comb over.”

Any other nurse bloggers out there on Facebook?

I was recently urged to create a Facebook profile by the CEO of the new company I’m working for. I hadn’t done so previously; I’d always thought of Facebook as the vehicle for teens and twentysomethings to keep in touch and share photos of themselves drinking out of plastic cups. But then I created my profile and began to realize that there’s a real dichotomy here.

There’s the Facebook of my early twentysomething cousin, Amy, “Oh Hey Cuz!” and “get me a girlfriend drink,” and then there is the Facebook of my new CEO, who’s friends list is filled with silicon valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

But there’s no one in between.

Where’s the girl I sat behind in Trigonometry?
(Archbishop Prendergast, class of ‘88 - nobody).

Where’s my old college roommate who used to dye her hair green?
(Loyola College, Maryland, class of ‘92 - nobody)

Where’s my study partner from pathophysiology?
(U of MD school of nursing, class of ‘04 - nobody)

Where are my MICU coworkers?
(the Greatest Hospital Of All Time - okay, I found two. We’ll see if they will agree to be my friend.)

Amy has 266 friends.
CEO has 215 friends.

I’ve got a long way to go.

And speaking of dichotomies, I’ve started a new blog, purely for my own pleasure. It’s called goodtailbadtail.com. Inspired by two things:

(1) Chris Anderson’s book about the new marketplace: The Long Tail

(2) and this delightful creature known as “Cabbage Dog”:

The concept is simple: Find something awesomely good at etsy and then find its evil twin/counterpart on ebay. I am open to submissions!