Nurse’s image: “The Heart Attack Grill”

/ Carey S. Clark, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, RYT, FAAN / Leave a comment

I would like to wish all nurses a wonderful and joyous celebration of Nurses’ Week. I believe we remain the world’s most caring and trusted profession, and I know for myself that the rewards of being a nurse and teaching nursing are beyond compare. We are blessed to be part of a diverse body of professionals that use interpersonal skills, caring modalities, and medical interventions in order to create healing spaces for those who are suffering or in need.

Nurse at the bedsidebusy nurses

So, I was shocked and saddened the other day to learn that there exists in our society places such as the “Heart Attack Grill” in Chandler, AZ. The heart attack grill is a hospital themed restaurant, where waitresses are referred to as nurses, and specialties include the triple and quadruple bypass burgers. Patrons or “patients” can be weighed in and if the scale tips over 350 pounds, the patron eats for free. This restaurant came to my attention when I saw that their 29 year old spokesperson Blair River, who weighed in at 575 pounds, died of pneumonia following Continue reading →

Change agents – or complicit?

/ Peggy L Chinn / 5 Comments

Over the past couple of weeks I have been giving a lot of thought to the issues of integrity that Carey wrote about last week.  Personal integrity is a challenge that increasingly affects Computer cheating cartoonnot only academics, but also practice and research.  And, this is at the core of what we are seeking to address in the Nurse Manifest Project.  So this deserves lots of attention, and I hope that folks will get involved in some of this discussion!

In this post I want to lay some groundwork for things I will write about over the next several days and weeks — ways that we can work toward change, and interrupt ways that we are (often unknowingly) complicit.

Years ago I read Nel Noddings wonderful book “Women and Evil,” which has provided a grounding for me Continue reading →

Academic Integrity: State of the Issue in Nursing

/ Carey S. Clark, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, RYT, FAAN / 10 Comments

I was recently in an “all school” meeting at my University, where we offer courses via a variety of modalities. Some of the what I might call “more traditional” faculty expressed concerns about online learning and maintaining academic integrity. Having writerbeen an online student for both my MSN and PhD degrees, and having taught in nursing education programs online for the last 6 years, I must admit that I was sort of internally laughing at some of the concerns presented, such as “what if the person is not really posting their discussions?. “how can me be sure there are the student’s papers”, and “how do we know it is the student taking the exam?”. I mean we have to assume a certain level of academic integrity and honesty from our students, right?

But today I took pause when Peggy Chinn sent the following link to me from The Chronicle, which frequently discusses issues that Academicians face:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

The article is written by a person who purportedly writes students’ papers for them for a fee. This is of course disturbing Continue reading →

The spirituality of nursing practice

/ Carey S. Clark, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, RYT, FAAN / 1 Comment

Why aren’t hospitals and places of healthcare more like churches?

One of the required readings I have assigned to my nursing students in the past was Matthew Fox’s (year)  “Recreation of Work”, where Fox examines the issue of how to create a working environment where one’s spiritual essence is honored. I think this book exemplifies is a lot of what we are talking about when look to move our sacred profession away from the domination of medicine and toward anNurse with Miracle sign autonomous practice of caring, supporting, and loving our patients as they take their healing journeys.

How is it that we find ourselves over-worked, tired, and unable to create change in our practices? I have explored our professional issues in depth in my two nursing shortage articles, but I still wonder how we end up nearly each and every one of us personally giving away our healing power as we succumb to the dominant model of allopathic care and cure. Many of us became nurses because Continue reading →

Creating Change and Practicing Self Care

/ Carey S. Clark, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, RYT, FAAN / 6 Comments

Chaos abounds; And I sit, becoming a new person.

Moment to moment.

Breathing in and expanding; Breathing out and contracting.

Accepting change, for I am not in charge.

I let go of it all, and rightly place it in God’s hands.

I came to the Nurse Manifest project in 2001 as I was in my doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, studying group process and transformative learning and change. I related the transdisciplinary concepts I was learning about to the issues we have in the profession of nursing, and I wrote an article about the nursing shortage Continue reading →