Archive for May, 2008

Saw this headline show up on the “Twitter on Nurses” section of OX3:

Nurse Charged With Injecting Patients With Bleach

Basically, a former nurse, working at a DaVita Dialysis Center, injected two of her patients with bleach. Pretty horrific.

I’m wondering why Davita hired a “former” nurse to work in a dialysis center. Must be some reason she’s no longer a nurse. And why do the headlines have to say “NURSE charged with injecting patients with bleach,” when she’s no longer a nurse? It kind of makes me cringe.

A “former nurse” isn’t a nurse.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mental Father for leaving this link in the comments; it really clarifies some things:

Police: DaVita nurse injected 2 with bleach

Overall, this story is turning out to be pretty bizarre. There are some interesting comments in the Lufkin Daily News article regarding how dialysis nurses use a bleach solution to clean the equipment, and perhaps this is what the nurse ended up injecting into the patients by mistake. Either way, it is interesting that the patients survived.

Any dialysis nurses out there want to weigh in on this?

So here’s a screenshot of the progress I’ve made this week. Note that these changes aren’t live yet because I’m still tweaking them.

There are two main things I want you to see:

1. The color scheme - I chose to go with some different blues and I ditched the orange for red. Overall I’m happy with this palette, but as you can see, I still have a ways to go as far as making the text easier to read. It still looks very crowded. Building a single page aggregator is tough! I don’t mind though, because it’s forcing me push the limits of my typography skills.

2. The “featured” section - I want this site to serve as an aggregator page for people who are either too inexperienced, or too lazy to subscribe to feeds. Despite that, I still want to give those of you that do subscribe to feeds a reason to visit every once in awhile. Hence, the “featured” section. This will be in the form of a very short blog post and hopefully will be updated frequently. I’ve also thought about turning this into a “group” blog of sorts, so other people could submit posts linking to what they consider to be useful or interesting nursing content. There are different ways of getting this done and I will definitely look into them if I find enough people are interested.

As I am looking at this screenshot, I am thinking that there needs to be more pictures or graphics. Simple Pie does have a way of grabbing images from feeds and I’ve tried doing this but unfortunately the programming for that goes a little over my head. What images would I want to grab you might be wondering? Check this out. If you start looking at pictures from Flickr that are tagged with nurse, flickr has a way of clustering the tags so that you get images that are relevant to actual nurses (rather than people dressed up in freaky-sexy nurse outfits for Halloween.)

Anyway, that’s all for now! More updates to come next week.

I’ll bet some of you are going to hate me for saying this, but nursing isn’t such a bad job when you only do it part-time. And recovery room nursing isn’t so bad either, even though I’ve complained about it in the past. All it took was one shift back in the MICU to make me realize how good I had it in the recovery room. Let’s look at the advantages of being a recovery room nurse:

• No weekends, holidays, or night shifts.
• We are rarely “in the weeds” and even when we are, it’s very manageable.
• The patients are (for the most part) very nice, appreciative, and never poop in their bed - unlike MICU patients.

In fact, I’m starting to wonder why the recovery room that I work in needs to use so many agency nurses. Some days no less than a third of the nurses are agency. Given all of the advantages, I wonder why they have so much trouble recruiting good staff nurses.

Some of the possible disadvantages could be:

• Lack of a challenge, it’s really a very easy job to master.
• Too many waitress-type tasks; i.e. fetching cookies and ginger ale for patients.
• The doctors I work with (radiologists and interventional cardiologists) kind of lack that warm fuzziness you get from the medical docs. But you know what gives me the warm fuzzies these days? Not having to clean up poop

All of this being said, (doh!) I can think of some reasons why one would continue to be a MICU nurse:

• You crave excitement.
• You need to be challenged in your work.
• You don’t mind holidays, weekends or night shifts.

That used to be me - all three of them. It’s funny how things change though, when you start a family. I guess that’s one of the great advantages of being a nurse. When you get tired of one type of nursing, you can always try another. There is such a variety of jobs in our field that you could stick with nursing and never run out of ways to reinvent your career.

Unless of course your secret desire is to become the web designer that you failed to become in the 90’s. Then you may as well stick with recovery room nursing until you get it all sorted out.

I was excited to try out my Landau scrubs because they are the closest thing to hospital issue scrubs that I could find. One of the most difficult things about giving up my job as a staff nurse was turning in my nursing uniform. What do I like about them? The fit. They are the only scrubs that I can tuck the top in and still look presentable. They also get very soft with each washing. And I love the pockets. Just big enough without being too fussy, or bulging out. They also have that no-nonsense kind of a look to them that says, “Yes, I’m your nurse, and I’m here to get the job done.”

The Landau scrubs did not disappoint. The top is long enough to tuck in, and the pants can be worn a little low on the hip (so as not to look like Ed Grimly Jr. with my tucked in scrubs.) And just like the hospital issue scrubs, they have gotten softer with every washing. They were a tad bit on the snug side though, so I might have to upgrade to a medium.

I’ve complained a few times about color selection (the UPS brown scrubs, and the safety belt orange scrubs) but I finally hit a home run with the color I chose, wisteria. It is a nice, soft muted lavender. Very soothing and pretty, but not too pretty (meaning: no flowery prints for PixelRN!) As a matter of fact, if you check out the landau scrubs color selection, there are lots of nice, muted colors like sandstone, misty, and steel gray.

Overall, I am pleased with these scrubs and would highly recommend them for any type of nurse.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I will let you know that my friends at My Nursing Uniforms are compensating me for this review, although the compensation was not dependent on a positive or glowing review - what I am telling you here is my honest of opinion of these scrubs.)

I appreciate all the feedback I’ve been getting on Orientedx3, and today I came up with a new plan: I’m going to continue to work on it each week (hopefully!) and then blog about the changes I’ve made. Then, you guys can chime in - vote stuff up, vote it down, etc. and together we can create this work in progress. So here’s the latest version.

Here’s what I changed:

• Organized everything into categories
• Changed font sizes and colors to make things more readable
• I added a del.icio.us feed so that every time someone tags a site with “nurse” it will show up on OX3. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service, in case you haven’t heard of it before.
• I also added feeds for NursingLink and Allnurses, using Page2RSS. It creates RSS feeds where previously there were none. (I found it via twitter- thanks, agitproper!)
• I spruced up the logo a bit, but overall I’m having some second thoughts about this…

I’m wondering if I need a more user friendly name.

I’m thinking that the name “Orientedx3″ is too complicated, and not easily recognizable as something that has to do with nursing. For those reading that aren’t nurses, you might be wondering what it means. It’s a term that we use to describe people’s mental status, when documenting a patient assessment. If someone is “normal” we would document that the patient is “alert and oriented times 3,” hence the name, Orientedx3.

I actually have two other domain names registered that contain the word “nurse” in them and I am considering switching the whole thing over to one of them. I am just not in love with the OX3 logo and concept. You might be wondering why I would want to “switch” teams halfway into the game…Well, if I had a domain name with the word “nurse” In it, then the site would be much more SEO friendly, meaning more people could find it through google by using the search term “nurse.”

A note on the style

Some of the comments reflected that the site looked kind of blah, and I couldn’t agree more. I think I tried too hard to capture the minimalist style of alltop and popurls, and I failed miserably. For now I just want to settle on the the fonts, colors and layout to create something that is easy to read, looks good, and is user friendly. I did play around with the logo a bit, but there’s no sense in doing that much more if I’m not feeling all that committed to the name.

Drop-down menus

A couple people suggested I use drop down menus and I think this is a great idea. It would really ad to the user-friendliness of the site. Unfortunately I think I will have to learn javascript to do that, and so it might take awhile. Consider it on my horizon, though.

A final note

I realized that “before” and “after” pictures would have been very helpful. Unfortunately I realized this after I started implementing all of the changes. So on the next go-around I will be sure to include them.

At any rate these are the two questions I would ask of all of you out there in blogland:

1. Do you think I need a more nurse-friendly name?
2. Style-wise, do you think it’s easier to read?

Question: What do Respiratory Therapists do for fun?

Answer: Compete in the Texas Sputum Bowl.

via holaolah

See what interesting posts you can find by using twitter? ( ;

Why would a nurse want to use twitter?

First things first, what is twitter? Quite simply, it’s a microblogging tool. Think you have something witty/amusing/relevant to say and can get it in under 140 characters? Then twitter is for you. Want to connect with a community of people without having to write long, drawn out blog posts? I would suggest trying twitter. It’s like a slimmed down version of social networking. You write something, you read something. And you can have conversations with people. Short ones.

Along with twitter comes a great many sites that take twitter feeds and mash the data into something else entirely.

For example: Twittervision takes a map of the world and shows you real time tweets popping up on it. Twits Like Me can help you find friends on twitter. There’s also a very useful site called Summize, that you can use to track words as they occur on twitter. Here’s a very simple example of how I like to “play” with Summize:

This morning I got up at 5:45 AM, went to Summize and typed in “drinking”. Lots of tweets came back about drinking wine, getting drunk, etc. Then, an hour later I typed in “drinking” and got tweets about coffee and tea. It’s like watching the world go to bed and wake up at the same time. Try typing in “eating” somewhere around dinner time. You might just find yourself salivating.

And for a wonderfully compelling and beautiful site that uses data from Summize, I urge you to check out Twistori. But be forewarned. Your eyes might get stuck there for awhile.

Great. But I thought you were going to tell me why a nurse would want to use twitter?

For one, you can use Twitter to expand your online community. There are some tech savvy nurses out there using Twitter, and so why not try and connect with them? As you can see on Orientedx3, I am also using Twitter to get a glimpse of what people really think about nurses; the good, the bad, the fascinating, the irrelevant.

The thing that fascinates me the most about Twitter, and feed technology in general, is how it might be useful in medical situations.

Here’s a place where it could be used: Working in the recovery room, one of the problems I see for nurses is not getting enough background information on their patients. The patient reports that we receive are often short and without substance. Most of the time this suffices, but what happens when your patient takes a turn for the worst and you don’t have the right background information? You need to know the patient’s baseline and perhaps a little more about their history to take care of them.

Well, what if every patient had a feed that was connected to their EMR? It could basically serve as a mini-history of that patient’s hospitalization. It would include small blurbs of relevant info, like if the patients vital signs became abnormal, or if a one time dose of hydralazine had to be given, or if a patient required a blood transfusion. As a nurse, you could view this stream of feeds and get a much better picture of what the story is behind your patient. I could also imagine that the feed would be useful to physicians and pharmacists.

Anyhow, those are my Twitter thoughts for the day. Intrigued? Follow me!

If you go take a look at Orientedx3, you’ll see I’ve been performing some much needed CPR on it. It’s definitely a work in progress, as there is much to be done as far as the style and substance are concerned. But I thought it would be great if all of you out there could tell me what you think about it. My aim is to build a site that is actually useful to people. I’m going to be blogging about it all this week at PixelRN and so feel free to chime in on the discussion. Love it? Hate it? Completely indifferent? I welcome any and all feedback.

First let me tell you about my original vision:

In early 2007 I had the idea to start working on a website/blog that would serve as an aggregator for all things on the web that were related to nursing. I knew this could be done in an automated way through RSS feeds and PHP, but I just didn’t know how to do it. So instead I decided to launch OrientedX3 as a Wordpress blog, and just update it manually. This proved to be a lot of work, and then two things happened which completely sidetracked me:

1. Benjamin came along
2. NursingLink hired me as general manager.

I’ve since left NursingLink behind, but fortunately Ben is here to stay. About six weeks ago I started working less and staying at home more, and I decided I wanted to finish what I had started. In the process I came across two other sites that were doing something similar to what I had in mind: Popurls and Alltop. If they could do it, so could I. I was immediately inspired to pick up where I left off.

In the past year I’ve learned a little bit of PHP. Well, enough really to get me into trouble. Certainly not enough to build my own RSS agregator from scratch. But then I found an awesome Wordpress plugin called Simple Pie, and I was off and running.

And voila! Here it is. So what do you think?

One thing I have been wondering specifically is: Do you think a site like this could be useful?

One may ask, how is this different from using Bloglines or Google Reader to keep track of blogs and news stories?

I don’t know. I just like the idea of everything related to nursing on the same page. I like to think that this page would be a great answer to the question, “How do nurses use the Internet?” Unfortunately, sometimes I wonder if anyone is really asking this question.

Some drawbacks…

Not all nursing websites are savvy to the concept of RSS feeds, and therefore, I can’t include them on this page. For instance, I enjoy reading what the Center for Nursing Advocacy has to say. I don’t always agree with them, but I like the fact that they are doing something interesting. But there are no RSS feeds to be found on their site. Same with the ANA. Not a single use of RSS. I think this is going to change eventually. The vast majority of people’s eyes glaze over when I mention RSS but I think that feed technology is here to stay. It’s just going to take a little longer to catch on.

I’d also like to have a bigger section that tracks what nurses are saying on forums, but the big ones, Allnurses and NursingLink don’t use feeds for their forums. As you can see I’ve included NursingVoices, and Nursing Informatics Online.

Tomorrow: I’ll explain my fascination with Twitter, and why I chose to include it on OrientedX3.

Check out this cute video of University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing faculty and students demonstrating the art of EKG interpretation through tap dancing. Now if they could throw a Wenckebach in there, I’d really be impressed. (via Beka at Medscape Nurses)

It was recently brought to my attention by my dear friend Max that I haven’t blogged in over two weeks. Just wanted to let you all know that I am still alive and kicking. I’m picking up a shift here and there in the Recovery Room, but also working on some web-related projects which I will hopefully be posting about soon. In the meantime, I will leave you with a picture of a Bonsai tree I’ve been working on in illustrator: