Self care and COVID-19 from the RCN

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

Don’t panic – it’s just more information on coronavirus! Hard not to quell the rising fear when faced with front page news, running television commentary, masks on public transport, hand gel being brandished like weapons, ‘the Wuhan shake’ in place of a hand shake making us all look as if we are doing a strange chicken dance.  Has the world gone mad with overreaction and the reality is that it is “no worse than flu” (which let’s face it can be rather grim) or is this a mass conspiracy theory where information and misinformation need spy level training?

What can you do and how can you look after yourself and those you love? Think of me as the James Bond of coronavirus if you will?

This useful infographic from the BBC gives simple self care steps for protecting yourself and what to do should you feel ill or think you are at risk.

What IS coronavirus?

Coronavirus infections are not new and are a common cause of the common cold. This particular coronavirus disease, or COVID-19 for short, is caused by infection with a new strain of the virus: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) which was first identified in late December 2019 (hence the 19 for COVID-19). It was first seen in the city of Wuhan in China but has since then spread across the world to over 100 countries or regions of the world.

Why the panic?

The reason for the worry is because it is a new infection and the full impact of it or how it will affect people is not yet fully understood. There is however, a lot we do know

Read More from the Royal College of Nursing

10 reasons not to panic about the coronavirus

Image by Claritysat from Pixabay 

Regardless of whether we classify the new coronavirus as a pandemic, it is a serious issue. In less than two months, it has spread over several continents. Pandemic means sustained and continuous transmission of the disease, simultaneously in more than three different geographical regions. Pandemic does not refer to the lethality of a virus but to its transmissibility and geographical extension.

What we certainly have is a pandemic of fear. The entire planet's media is gripped by coronavirus. It is right that there is deep concern and mass planning for worst-case scenarios. And, of course, the repercussions move from the global health sphere into business and politics.

But it is also right that we must not panic. It would be wrong to say there is good news coming out of COVID-19, but there are causes for optimism; reasons to think there may be ways to contain and defeat the virus. And lessons to learn for the future.

(1) We know what it is

The first cases of AIDS were described in June 1981 and it took more than two years to identify the virus (HIV) causing the disease. With COVID-19, the first cases of severe pneumonia were reported in China on December 31, 2019 and by January 7 the virus had already been identified. The genome was available on day 10....

Read More on RTE

Some Doctoral-Prepared Nurses Use The Title, “Doctor” and It’s Causing a Heated Debate

As doctoral-prepared nurses become more mainstream, a debate between medical doctors and doctoral-prepared nurses, is growing more prevalent. The number of nurses with doctoral degrees has increased significantly in the past decade. For instance, in just four years, from 2014 to 2018, the number of nurses with doctoral degrees, either DNPs or PhDs, nearly doubled, from 3,065 to 6,090.  

For example, let’s take a look at a recent informational video on our Instagram page featuring Dr. Charnelle, “Nurse Nelle,” a doctorate-prepared CRNA, that brought up an interesting question in the healthcare community: should doctorate-prepared nurses be called doctors? Or is the distinction too confusing for patients and even fellow staff?

Here’s a closer look at doctoral-prepared nurses, why there’s controversy over the use of “Dr.” in their title, and how nurses feel about the topic

Read more at Nurse.org

Is there a cure for the new coronavirus?

COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus, has spread to every continent except Antarctica. Not too long after the virus was first discovered at the end of December, labs turned their sights toward treatment.

Currently, however, there is no cure for this coronavirus, and treatments are based on the kind of care given for influenza (seasonal flu) and other severe respiratory illnesses, known as "supportive care," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These treatments essentially treat the symptoms, which often in the case of COVID-19 involve fever, cough and shortness of breath. In mild cases, this might simply mean rest and fever-reducing medications such as acetaminophen (Tylenol) for comfort.

Read on at livescience.com

10 Tips For Surviving The 12-Hour Shift

We all know that nursing is both a challenging and rewarding career. Working in a 12-hour hospital shift is an inevitable part of the “challenging” category.

Though nurses have been used to this kind of set-up, sleep deprivation and fatigue (1) could be detrimental both for the nurse’s health and also for her patients’ safety. There are surprisingly few studies describing how shift work is associated with diet and weight-related conditions.

Shift work has been associated with increased body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, blood pressure, and low-density lipoprotein. In other words, metabolic syndrome.

But according to a Lippincott’s Nursing Center journal, there are proven ways to keep nurses in their best shape despite the mandatory 12-hour shift that they have to withstand.

Here are the 10 tips for the 12-hour shift survival:

Some of the tips include:

Follow a Mediterranean-style eating plan 

Make sure you’re getting enough vitamin D  

Get enough sleep   

Stay hydrated

Read more at Nurse Bluff

Why Can't Science Explain Consciousness?

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells — known as neurons — each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some 10 trillion nerve connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behavior. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able to answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness — it was not taken to be a fitting topic for "serious science." Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.

Read more at Live Science

Oliver McGowan death prompts mandatory autism training

Oliver McGowan, 18, died at Southmead hospital in Bristol in 2016 after being given a drug he was allergic to despite repeat warning from his parents.

The government has announced funding of £1.4m to develop and test the new training package.

Training is not currently mandatory and varies, a government spokesperson said.

The targeted programme will be "named in memory of Oliver McGowan and in recognition of his family's tireless campaigning for better training for staff" a government spokesperson said.

It will draw on case studies which "capture exactly why NHS and social care staff need learning disability and autism training" the spokesperson said.

An independent review is to be carried out into Oliver McGowan's death.

Read more at BBC News

A Basic Meditation to Tame Your Inner Critic

Nearly everyone recognizes the inner critic, that judgemental voice inside us that heckles and cuts us down. Whatever we do isn’t enough.
This push for perfection is exhausting, but often avoidable with practice. Rationalizing with what is basically an irrational habit doesn’t help much. The inner critic is like the old two guys on the Muppet Show endlessly deriding whatever happens without reason at all. Reasoning with our inner tyrant validates it as if it deserves our attention when mostly it's just an unhelpful pattern of thinking we’ve picked up along the way.
Read more at mindful.org

Third-level students are suffering from extreme anxiety and depression, study shows

IRELAND’S FIRST STUDY into third-level students’ mental health has indicated that a significant number are suffering from anxiety (38.4%), depression (29.9%) and stress (17.3%).

The Union of Students in Ireland will later today publish the first National Report on Student Mental Health in Third Level, which shows that many students suffer from extreme stress or anxiety. In some cases this appeared to be linked with the subject they were studying. 

Those studying in the areas of health science and hospitality appear to be more likely to be within normal ranges and less likely to be extremely severely anxious, according to the survey.

Those studying engineering were least likely to be extremely severely anxious (32.9%).

Read more at The Journal.ie 

What Meditation Looks Like In Your Brain, According To Experts

You sit down, focus on your breathing, and attempt to get rid of all the stress of the day through a few minutes of meditation — but what really happens in your brain when you're meditating? The answer, experts tell Bustle, is more complex than it might seem. The neuroscience of meditation is a broad and complicated area of research, and scientists are often more interested in the impact of your meditation practice on your brain over the long term.
"If meditation just produces changes when you're meditating, it's like a drug, and it would wear off — and what would be the point of that?" Dr. Richard Davidson, PhD, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, tells Bustle. However, the changes that occur in your brain while you're meditating build up over time to produce remarkable shifts in cognition and brain structure. The meditating brain is a very cool thing.

Read More at Bustle.com

The placebo experiment can my brain cure my body? Dr Michael Mosely

Could taking a placebo, a pill which contains nothing but ground rice, really help cure back pain?

Jim Pearce is certainly convinced.

When we first met, the 71-year-old was confined to a wheelchair and using morphine because of his back pain.

But after he took part in our study, taking our convincingly-labeled blue-and-white-striped "new" painkillers, he seemed like a different person.

The only thing was that he'd been taking placebos; dummy pills - they contained nothing but ground rice. But they worked.

"I just woke up one morning and I thought, hang about, I haven't got a twinge in my back. And it's been going from strength to strength."

I asked him which he preferred, my pills or the morphine?

"I got rid of the morphine and kept taking your blue pills."

Jim was one of 100 people who took part in a trial for our BBC2 Horizon programme: Can my brain cure my body?

It was a back pain study - with a twist. The twist being that everyone, unknowingly, was getting placebo? We wanted to see if people taking the pills would get better anyway?

Read more at BBC News

A Mindfulness Practice for Stressed-Out Parents

In spite of my bookshelf from graduate school, much of what I’ve learned about parenting has come from my parents, and my own experience as a parent—as it has for us all. I’m a clinical psychologist who has spent the better part of 20 years specializing in the treatment of children, as well as in counseling parents. I’m trained, licensed, experienced, and even fairly well-read. And as a parent myself, I can honestly answer “that” question from anxious parents coming to me for help–whether my understanding of what they’ve been through extends from professional to personal. So yes, I know quite a bit professionally and personally about parenting.

Read more at Mindful