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Medscape has an interesting question in their Legal and Professional Issues for Nurses–Staying Late to Chart: Is it Legal? Read it and let me know what you think about its implications for our own practice.

I’m waiting to board my flight to Tokyo. By the time I land I will be 44. Forty three was an extraordinary year for me, full of great love and great laughter. I can only hope 44 will be as sweet. Now’s as good a time as any to send out a note of gratitude to you all– my friends and colleagues who read this site, who make the work so rewarding and who constantly challenge and shape me as a professional. You also helped make 43 something truly special. So as I wait to get on this ridiculously long plane ride, all that’s left for me to do at this point is ponder my very favorite question: what’s next?

Talk to you all from the other side of the date line…

Going into the Memorial Day Weekend I leave you with this powerful video from TEDMED:

I couldn’t help but post this today after spending quite a bit of time last week talking with folks about social media use and its reflection on our professional selves. It’s a very short piece (under 7 minutes), and while this isn’t the most electric talk I’ve heard from the folks at TED, the content was on point:

Greeting to all of the new readers from last week’s conference in Kansas City. Just a reminder that if you subscribed to FHO, you will need to verify the subscription, which will show up as an email from Feedburner in your inbox. If you don’t see it check your spam folder.

The forensic nursing community has lost a great friend and colleague, Lydia Vandiver. Our thoughts and prayers are with Lydia’s family, her colleagues and her community. She loved this work and I am personally grateful I had the opportunity to get to know her. She will be missed.

I regret that I will not be able to start our week as we usually do here at FHO. I am, as I type this, sitting in the US Air club at DCA logging the first of what will be many, many hours spent in airports over the next 5 weeks–23 out of 35 days on the road. I am in my final push to the summer when I largely stop traveling in order to have time with my girlchild. So I’m headed to Kansas City today for a hot minute to teach for the Army before I head back east to Vermont for a workshop later this week. My hope is that I will have regular posts up, but please extend a bit of latitude if I fall short. In the meantime, please read this. Especially if you are a clinician or a manager of people (yes, it’s a business article, but it is relevant nonetheless), because I know I could use a bit of help, and perhaps–just maybe–you could, too.

“Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.”
Thomas A. Edison

(via swissmiss)

I get a lot of questions about the resources I rely on–what are the essential  books, journals and websites I turn to to do this work. I am a firm believer that you can find relevance anywhere you choose to look for it. I am also a firm believer that all knowledge makes you better at what you do, period. So I recently received an email from a relatively new FHO reader asking about my go-to non-clinical resources, in response to a conversation we’d been having about program management issues. A few of these I’ve mentioned before, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a single list of these resources, so without further delay, a new 10 Things: Non-Clinical Resources.

Because almost everything I do professionally is virtual, save some of the teaching and testimony work, being able to communicate online is pretty vital. But I don’t think you have to be in the consulting business to understand why it is a critical skill, and clinicians aren’t exempt from this. So I loved Harvard Business Blog’s piece: How To Avoid Virtual Miscommunication. And they address one of my biggest pet peeves–the sloppy email: “The underlying message is that those individuals are far too busy to be bothered with writing perfectly polished text. Unfortunately, sloppy e-mails at best require wasting time trying to decipher them, and at worse cause workplace misunderstandings and costly errors.” It’s a short piece worth a read–especially if you are a project consultant/partner/manager of any stripe or someone managing a clinical team.

Annals of Internal Medicine has published a new position paper from the American College of Physicians and the Federation of State Medical Boards: Online Medical Professionalism: Patient and Public Relationships. I haven’t seen a lot from the physician groups on this issue, so I look forward to reading through it. RWJF’s Human Capital Blog has a nice summary of the paper here. And if you’ve never read the National Council of State Boards of Nursing’s white paper on social media use, you can find that here (PDF).

Our thoughts are with our friends and colleagues in Boston. With those of you who ran, or had family or friends running; those of you at the scene; those of you on the squads; and those of you working in the Emergency Departments and trauma units. Here’s to finding some peace amidst the chaos, some light in dark times.

This article from the Wall Street Journal is specifically about physicians, but there is no doubt in my mind that the lessons in it extend to all of us who do this work. I was particularly interested in their graphic about the price of poor communication. Something to think about–and maybe discuss at your next team meeting.

Excellent news being reported in the US today: a federal judge has ordered the FDA to make emergency contraception available over the counter for all ages. Read the decision here.

Because I get *so* many questions about this issue, and because it is now a standard part of my testimony lecture, allow me to repost the National Council of State Boards of Nursing‘s white paper, A Nurse’s Guide to the Use of Social Media (PDF). Everyone should read it; program managers, maybe a few times so you can use it as the foundation for meaningful conversation at an upcoming staff meeting.

I’ll be back tomorrow (from a week’s vacation with my family) with regularly scheduled posts. Apologies for the sparse content as of late.

Can you stand another article posting? Good, because this one is a recently published, full-text article on one of my favorite topics: Advancing Nursing Practice Through Social Media. It’s available from the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing via Medscape, so if you don’t have a log-in there you’ll need one (it’s free).

In light of yesterday’s post, allow me to point your attention to this article, published in last month’s NIJ Journal: Ending Modern Day Slavery: Using Research to Inform US Anti-Human Trafficking Efforts ( it’s also available as a free full-text PDF).

On Wednesday, one of the things we talked about in the sessions I led was the issue of social media use. Now I am a huge fan, as most of you know, and I think there are some incredible ways to harness social media professionally. Not sure how?