Nurses Month 2020
By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist
This months episode of “News you can Use” in the traditions of “Ask Me Anything” on HealthcareNOWRadio features news from the month of May where we focus on Nurses Month, COVID19 testing and Immunity and USMLE Step 1 Exam Cancellations.
Episode NOW on Demand
You can read more about the series here and the concept of keeping up with innovating in healthcare. Please send me your suggestions on topics you’d like to see covered. You can reach out direct via the contact form on my website, send me a message on LinkedIn or on my Facebook page (DrNickvT), or on Twitter tagging me (@DrNic1) and #TheIncrementalist or you can click this link to generate a ready-made tweet to fill in.
As I did last month I am talking to Craig Joseph, MD (@CraigJoseph) Chief Medical Officer at Avaap.
May is Month of the nurse with ANA changing the traditional week to a month this year. Our family has a long tradition with my mother-in-law and wife both nurses and we salute them and all the current hard workmen front line, clinical colleagues.
We share some of our personal experiences including the guidance from the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine that was the pocket guide for every new doctor on the wards. As you can see from the attached screenshot the guidance was clear:
How to pass the nasogastric tube Nurses are the experts and will ask you (who may have never passed one before) to do so only when they encounter difficulties. Proceed as follows:
- Don a plastic apron.
- Observe the nurse having one more attempt. This will give a rough idea of how it is done—she may even succeed.
- Tell the patient what you want to do. Let him be in control.
- Take a new, cool (hence less flexible) tube……
We review the latest news on COVID19 and discuss the challenges of testing for patients in our current healthcare system as well as the recent WHO Guidelines on Immunity that created some confusion. Listen in to hear about the recent announcement by the USMLE to cancel 50% of the Step 1 exams (their website and the phone line went down) leaving half the rising third-year medical students in a desperate place of uncertainty and little information to go on aside from vague notes about alternative delivery options, missing opportunities to get ahead of it by advancing the pass-fail option that’s scheduled for the future to now and allowing other testing options as used to be possible with medical schools delivering the testing.
This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.
