Category: Empowered Nurses

On April 18, 2019, Maureen Walsh, a senator in the Washington state legislature, stuck her foot in her mouth.  No, not literally but figuratively. Not since comedian and TV host Joy Behar said to a nurse wearing a stethoscope, “What is that thingy around your neck?” has such a gaffe on our profession been made publicly. When arguing about legislation […]

Surely this can’t be happening to me.  I love what I do.  Yet the signs were so insidious and I thought, as most nurses do, that I could do it all.  In the beginning, I stopped doing yoga, then meditation and then eating properly.  My self-care went down the drain.  I was irritable with my children and frustrated with myself.  […]

As much as we may believe nursing is all about the care, health care these days basically has taken most of the “care” out of nursing.  We have devices like the one that can take blood pressure and put those readings into the medical record.  We also have machines that dispense medications. While nurses are more than just machines, we […]

We all have an ego which serves the purpose of keeping us safe. One thing it does in protecting us is it causes us to judge others which then makes us feel better. Now you’ve got it. The biggest poison in nursing is judgment. We, as nurses, don’t even realize how judgmental we are. Even though in nursing school we […]

If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. Maybe as a nurse and a generally a healthy person, I have taken my health for granted. This year has shown me that if I don’t take care of myself, no one else will. Using S in GIFTS, you’re the source of everything that happens in your life. If you […]

LAB:   Hey, everybody.  It’s Lorie Brown with empowerednurses.org and today’s special guest is Blayne Miley, Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Indiana State Nurses Association.  Blayne also is an attorney so I’m really excited to be with him because I want him to hear about how nurses can go about making change, how nurses can be active in the […]

Lorie Brown, Nurse Attorney, discusses her recent informal survey on Show Me Your Stethoscope on the 1 thing that Nurses would change in Nursing. The results may surprise you – or maybe not! If you are interested in reading the Empowered Nurses’ Bill of Rights, you can click on this link: https://empowerednurses.org/nurses-bedside/empowered-nurses-bill-of-rights/

In 1999, a seminal study was performed by the Institute of Medicine which identified that 44,000 to 98,000 deaths each year result from medical errors.  Unfortunately, over the almost 2 decades since, not much progress has been made.  It seems that despite our high-tech society, we are losing our touch. A review study revealed that a majority of those deaths […]

Were you aware that 69% of all workplace violence and injuries were suffered by healthcare and social service workers?  This is terrifying. And it isn’t only patients who are causing the violence.  Recently a nurse in an operating room was choked not by a patient, but by an anesthesiologist!  [Link to article]  He is facing second-degree assault charges and reportedly […]

As nurses, when we enter a patient’s room, we are expected to immediately get into a relationship with the patient to create trust.  The patient then shares their most intimate medical history along with their pressing problems.  We meet them when they are in their most vulnerable state and enter into a most personal aspect of their lives. It is […]