July 2018 Highlights

This Month in AJN –  July 2018 monthly highlights
July 2018

Editor-in-chief Shawn Kennedy and clinical editor Betsy Todd present the highlights of the July issue of AJN. Our first CE, “Original Research: The Efficacy and Safety of an RN-Driven Ketamine Protocol for Adjunctive Analgesia During Burn Wound Care,” describes a study that evaluated the efficacy and safety of a practice protocol allowing critical care RNs to independently administer IV ketamine for burn wound care. Our second CE, “Breast Cancer Screening: A Review of Current Guidelines,” reviews the guidelines of the American Cancer Society, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and provides guidance to nurses as they support and educate patients. The authors of our next article, “Ethics Champion Programs,” discuss how these programs prepare nurses to function as unit-based ethics resources for colleagues as they face common ethical issues and challenges. “Cultivating Quality: Making It Stick: Developing and Testing the Difficult Intravenous Access (DIVA) Tool” reports on a QI initiative to create a simple evidence-based tool to help novice nurses predict which patients will present peripheral IV access challenges. In addition, there’s News, Reflections, Drug Watch, Art of Nursing, and more.