ACCESS Nursing News and Blog

Nurse communication is one of the key ways to ensure patient safety and quality care. How you communicate affects all aspects of your job performance and everyone you interact with.

Not everyone has the day off to spend with family and friends on Thanksgiving. Many nurses are scheduled to work a long shift on the holiday. So, here are a few tips for these nurses to help make their day more festive:

The holiday season is a time for festive activities, changes in daily routines, connecting with extended family, and annual traditions. Although this sounds like a lot of fun, for seniors living with Alzheimer’s this can cause an extreme amount of stress.

November is National Caregivers Month, a time to recognize and honor caregivers for their dedication, care, and compassion for others.

As the days begin to get darker earlier, working the night shift may become more challenging. Keeping your body awake during twilight hours can prove to be exhausting and extremely difficult to do.

Halloween festivities are fun for most people but can also cause great anxiety and confusion for people living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Halloween decorations, scary costumes, and masks, as well as surprise “trick-or-treat” visitors can be extremely distressing and frightening to them.

COVID-19 has surely highlighted the ever-widening healthcare disparities among racial and minority groups. Between March 2020 and June 2021, Hispanic or Latino and non-Hispanic Black people were hospitalized with COVID-19 at a rate 2.8 times higher than non-Hispanic White people, when taking age into account.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. According to the CDC breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the US, with about 255,000 cases diagnosed each year, and about 2,300 cases a year in men.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on the professional and personal lives of nurses throughout the US. Working in the health care industry right now, particularly as a frontline worker, has been called exhausting as nurses are being pushed to their limits. Today’s job definition for a frontline worker is now considered to be one of the most demanding and stressful. An American Nurses Association (ANA) survey asked 22,000 nurses nationwide how they were feeling. The results found 51% felt exhausted, 43% felt overwhelmed, and 28% felt a desire to quit the profession or their current position.

We have officially entered the “flu season.” Medical experts report that they are expecting some confusion in the coming months as cases of the flu emerge at the same time as the number of people, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, who test positive for COVID-19 increases throughout the US.