Unless you’re a nurse, work in a health care institution where there are nurses, work at Cinnabon, a card shop or flower shop, or a company that prints messages on pens, water bottles or other tchotchkes,  this week could happily pass you by without knowing its National Nurses Week.

In searching for the history of how this came about, you can find this exact sentence in almost every post, “In 1953, Dorothy Sutherland of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare sent a proposal to President Eisenhower to proclaim a “Nurse Day”..)  That never happened. I tried to find out more about Ms. Sutherland to no avail. Wonder if one of you may know more about her.  There are too many Dorothy Sutherland’s on Facebook and LinkedIn and nothing came up on my Google search.

Fast forward to 1974 when the International Council of Nurses proclaimed International Nurse Day on May 12, Florence Nightingale’s birthday. In 1990, the American Nurses Association decided it should be a whole week  beginning on May 6 and ending on May 12. We now have National Student Nurses Day too.

This is the week you’ll hear about the Gallop Poll results that show when you ask Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of numerous professions nurses make the top of the list every year since except in 2001 when firefighters were included on a one-time basis after 9/11. They’ve been polling since 1976 and the profession of nursing was added in 1999. We’ve come along way baby.

So we’re trusted (that’s good news).  Let’s leverage that trust and our smarts and expertise to get a seat at the policy table and into other stakeholder positions working to create quality and cost-effective health care that is accessible to all Americans.

How about we take action and unite to tell our colleagues and employers to thank us in different way this year and going forward. Tell them (graciously) that you don’t need another pen, water bottle or tote bag with the institution’s name on it. Ask them to use the dedicated budget (plus more $$$) to financially support the work of your state’s Action Coalition and the Campaign for Action to implement the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine’s report on The Future of Nursing.

Now that’s a proclamation I can sign.

Barbara Glickstein is the co-director of the Center.

Patricia Volland, MSW

"Care coordination" is a new buzz word in the lexicon of health care reform. Most everyone agrees that it will improve clinical outcomes and reduce costs for patients with multiple chronic illnesses and will also help to improve the health care experience of those who are not as sick. Patricia Volland is a social worker, Senior Vice President and Director of the the Social Work Leadership Institute at the New York Academy of Medicine, who is a national leader in care coordination. In recent years, she has also had personal experience and shares her views on it with Healthstyles producer and moderator, Diana Mason, RN. The program airs this morning at 11:00 AM on WXMR-FM (wxmrfm.com, 100.7 FM in upstate NY and Vermont). Click here to listen to the interview: Volland

THE WAITING ROOM is a character-driven documentary that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients.

CHMP is co-sponsoring two screenings in May of Pete Nick’s THE WAITING ROOM an award-winning film about health care told through individual stories of patients, providers and family members at a public hospital emergency room in Oakland CA. We showed the film at our Envision Health series last November to a riveted audience. If you missed it last November be sure to see it at a screening in May!

MAY 12 – The Schomburg Center in Manhattan – 4pm. There will be a Q&A after the film with Pete Nicks and health experts. There will be preventative health screenings available at the event and a table of healthy snacks.

MAY 19 – Rooftop Films in Brooklyn – 8pm. Along with the film there will be preventative health screenings available at the event and a table of healthy snacks.

Please visit the film’s website for tickets & more information about the film and national social media project:

On this week’s Healthstyles program, Dr. Nancy Rudner, RN, consultant and health coach, talks about her work as a health coach for frontline workers who may have difficulty accessing health care and living healthy lives. She talks with Healthstyles moderator Diana Mason, RN, about what’s in the Afforldable Care Act (the health care reform law) that is beneficial to frontline workers and shares a new online resource that anyone can use to find out how the new law will affect them. You can hear the program on WBAI-FM (www.wbai.org) on April 26th at 11:00 PM, or on WXMR-FM  (www.wxmrfm.com) on April 23 at 11:00 AM. Or click here to listen to the program: Rudner

This is a guest post by Jennifer R. Tucker, MA, RN, President of the Minnesota Organization of Registered Nurses, on the nursing faculty at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, and a Member of the Congress of Nursing Practice and Economics at the American Nurses Association.

Since the birth of modern nursing in healthcare we have paid more to treat illness than we do to prevent it.  This concept has bewildered those of us in the healthcare field and many in the public for decades, especially since solid research has been putting the numbers and dollar signs together that prevention saves $$$$.  So it should have been no surprise when I heard the following exchange while catching a bit of a rerun of Shark Tank recently.

The product being discussed was First Defense Nasal Screens,  which help to filter the air you breathe of a majority of the environmental toxins, allergens, and viruses we are exposed to every day.

Question from Shark: ”Why not just go license it to one of the big drug companies

Answer from Entrepreneur: ”I did that originally. I went to one of the biggest in the United States, and they told me our company was actually a competitor, and if they took the product they would shelf it. Because why would they prevent it for $1 when they could treat it for $14.” (Are these exact quotes?”  Yes they are.

Even though I normally would have passed right over the statement, this time it really hit me and I felt anger at the arrogance.   Why is profit the driving force over the pubic’s health? Usually, people defend the companies right to make money on their products and they would be partially right.   So let’s reframe the question this way, “Why are we, the public, not more in charge of these choices for ourselves?”  Remember that we have power of the purse. With more transparency, like this conversation, the public is becoming more savvy and asking the right questions.

As a nation, we have been conditioned to put more focus on treatment than prevention, but this viewpoint is changing.  With data in hand, those on the front lines of healthcare reform are shouting the prevention first message from the rooftops and are being heard.

Here are just a few examples of prevention funding in the Affordable Care Act:

1. National Prevention Council: A board to help coordinate prevention efforts and strategies in the government to have the largest impact.
2. Public Health Training Centers: Funding to help increase those trained in public health and expand the services offered in public health.
3. Putting Prevention to Work Fund:  Gives communities support to expand programs aimed at prevention activities.

Over $250 million was allocated for the above programs and many others to work towards increasing prevention in this country

These federally funded prevention models and provisions support prevention for the public’s health.  It’s up to those of us in health care to get the message out to the public in order to shift the long-standing culture of treatment as health care to prevention and promotion of health. We can start small, within our own circles and communities.  The top of the mountain does not have to be the goal of each individual, but the collective contribution of everyone will get us to the top of the mountain.    The top of the mountain will get us to a place where the drug companies response would have been, “Great, now we can prevent diseases for $1 that it would have cost $14 to treat!”

JAMA Forum Logo

I was asked by Howard Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association, but the journal goes by “JAMA”), to join a group of physicians, economists, and health services researchers this year to blog about the presidential race and health-related events, including the Supreme Court’s hearing of challenges to the Affordable Care Act. This is a first for the JAMA blog (news@JAMA) and has been given a separate name: JAMA Forum. It’s fairly new and most of the posts are about their articles or other health news. The argument for venturing into the realm of the politics of health care was made by JAMA news editor Joan Stephenson, Bauchner, and executive editor Phil Fontanorosa in an editorial in the March 14th issue of the journal. These blogs provide interesting commentaries thus far. But politics is tricky business and it remains to be seen whether the AMA’s members will think the JAMA Forum is a good idea. The editorial independence of JAMA makes it unlikely that the editors or authors of the JAMA Forum would be influenced by any member concerns. Certainly, the editors at JAMA confirmed with the blogging authors that their posts would be lightly edited only.

My first post about dinner conversations and the Supreme Court’s deliberations about the Affordable Care Act. Looking forward to more conversations.

Diana J. Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN, Co-director, CHMP

Sheree Crute, chairs the CHMP’s National Advisory Council. This post first appeared in The Root.

HIV / AIDS Trials: No Place for Black Women?

African-American women are routinely left out of clinical studies that could lead to new treatments.

Medical breakthroughs in curing sickle-cell anemia and treating prostate cancer and HIV/AIDS may dramatically improve life for the millions of people struggling with these diseases, but there are significant barriers that may keep African Americans from receiving this new, high-quality care. This article is the third and last in a series about how health care costs, policies and even the structure of the health care system may increase, rather than decrease, the health disparities we face. To read other articles in the series, click here.

Barbara Joseph is smart and resourceful and has advocated so successfully for African-American women living with HIV/AIDS in Texas that a clinic in Houston bears her name. That’s why it’s all the more surprising that Joseph faces barriers to obtaining treatment and participating in a clinical trial — an act that might improve her health and teach scientists more about black women and HIV/AIDS.

An HIV/AIDS activist for 20 years, who has been living with the disease just as long, Joseph is also executive director of Positive Efforts, an organization that provides information on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment for black women. Yet when asked if her organization had been approached about getting black women into clinical trials investigating cutting-edge HIV/AIDS treatments, Joseph said no. According to the nation’s leading advocates for black women living with the disease, there’s nothing unusual about that. The post continues here.

Charmaine Ruddock is a Senior Fellow and project director of Bronx Health REACH. 

Bronx Health REACH Town Hall Meeting: “Make Health Equality a Reality” – April 28^th

Bronx Health REACH, along with Assemblymember Nelson Castro and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, is organizing a Town Hall meeting on Saturday, April 28^th from 10 am to 1 pm called “Make Health Equality a Reality.” The event will take place at P.S. 33 in the Bronx (2424 Jerome Avenue). The Town Hall will include a panel of legislators, doctors, community members, and lawyers discussing the inequities in the health care system. Audience members will be invited to ask questions about health care access. The event is open to all and breakfast will be provided for all attendees. Please see the attached flier for more information (English and Spanish). We hope to see you all there!

Picture this: a female student at Georgetown Law School, already highly a highly accomplished advocate for women’s rights, speaks out in favor of mandated private insurance coverage for birth control, even by religious institutions. Sandra Fluke was testifying before congressional Democrats – not waving protest signs, not making a spectacle of herself, just speaking her mind, as our First Amendment allows her to do.

Enter one ultra conservative, controversial, and thin-line-walking  radio talk show host. Ignoring the basic facts, Rush Limbaugh proceeds with an angry, highly charged, personal attack on Fluke – calling her “slut” and “prostitute” among other names. All because she spoke out in favor of a particular policy supporting a woman’s reproductive choices.

Within minutes, news of Limbuaugh’s rant was all over Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. As they had in the in other recent situations where women’s rights were under attack, feminists, activists, and others of both genders who felt compelled to get involved, blasted Limbaugh for his offensive and highly inappropriate comments. Protesters not only targeted him and urged that his show be shut down , but also targeted the advertisers – big names like AOL, ProFlowers, and Quicken Loans, among others.

It worked. As of Monday, 12 advertisers had pulled their spots and two radio stations had dumped the show.  Several more said they planned to do the same.

This almost instant response via social media to real or perceived threats to women’s rights should not be a surprise – not after the swift action taken against the Susan G. Koman Foundation when they pulled funding from Planned Parenthood  just a couple of months ago. Did Rush or his producers miss this story? Although Limbaugh did eventually apologize for his remarks, the damage has been done.. Maybe this controversial figure will pause before he spouts such distasteful comments and or puts his foot in it again. One can only hope it’s a lesson learned.

Love him or hate him, Rush Limbaugh has the same First Amendment right to speak his mind as Sandra Fluke, or you, or I do. However, there is a very clear line between expressing an opposing point of view, especially as a public figure, and calling a 30 year-old woman vile names for respectfully stating her opinion.

The world now moves in nanoseconds. No sooner had the comment been made then hashtags started appearing on the Twitter timeline, and petitions started making the rounds on Facebook. There are those out there that may still think social media is a passing phase. They underestimate its power at their own risk.

A growing number of states across the country are establishing state-sanctioned mandates that women seeking abortions undergo a mandatory transvaginal or transabdominal ultrasound. In addition to being a violation of womens rights, these mandates raise the question of unnecessary medical requirements or what’s referred to as futile care – it doesn’t further the health of the patient and runs up the cost of health care. The politicalization of medical practices and standards of care in providing reproductive health services demands our serious attention. 

Barbara Glickstein, Co-director CHMP

Here’s a repost  of an article by Robin Marty originally posted in RH Reality Check. 

In the wake of the Virginia forced transvaginal ultrasound debate in Virginia, bill supporters have tried to justify their bil by stating that ultrasounds are the “gold medal standard” of pre-abortion care.  But are they?

As one midwife explains in an article on The Clinical Advisor, unless a patient presents with an issue that would have a medical practitioner suspect an ectopic pregnancy, often they aren’t used at all.

Robyn Carlisle, MSN, CNM, WHNP, full-scope midwife at University Doctors and Kennedy University Hospital in Sewell, N.J., writes:

I recently saw a patient in the office for amenorrhea, severe left-sided pelvic pain, and a positive home pregnancy test. I ordered blood work and a stat ultrasound to rule out ectopic pregnancy. When I mentioned the ultrasound, the patient balked and confided that she was uncertain whether she wanted to continue the pregnancy.

My patient felt that an ultrasound would just complicate an already painful decision to terminate the pregnancy. I explained to her that while I understood her apprehension, given her clinical presentation, we needed to ensure this was not a tubal pregnancy and move forward with the ultrasound.

Under normal circumstances in New Jersey, this patient would not have needed an ultrasound to confirm her pregnancy, especially if she was considering an abortion. Unfortunately, not all women have this choice.  Read the rest of the post here.

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