The Australian College of Nursing (ACN) Emerging Nurse Leader (ENL) Program supports up to fifty aspiring nurse leaders each year with targeted learning and development opportunities. The program is divided into five stages, beginning with undergraduate students and continuing through to nurses in their sixth year of practice. This structure ensures that participants receive the…
Transition is the experience of moving from a familiar environment or role to another. New Graduate Registered Nurses (GRNs) can experience a phenomenon known as transition shock as they enter practice for the first time (Graf et al., 2020). The cause of transition shock is related to a clash of values and expectations between the…
The physiological processes of the human body and how diseases affect it was one reason a career in nursing appealed to me. I found it fascinating at how simple the processes appeared, but they were so complex all the way down to the subatomic level. For some reason, sepsis was one topic in university I…
Over the last 20 years, a significant effort has been made to improve women’s health overall. However, there are still many issues faced by millions of women across Australia every day. This Women’s Health Week, I would like to highlight the issue of gender inequality in healthcare and discuss how we, as nurses and healthcare…
Imagine it is your first day on a new ward as a nursing student. You check your fresh-pressed scrubs that are often too big for you, four pens in your pocket in case any of the brand new pens fail on you for some reason, stethoscope in your pocket, badge perfectly aligned so everyone knows…
Featured Image: Peter Galleghan on Shutterstock For many of us nursing students, placement takes place in a medical/surgical environment where most of our shift consists of meticulous care plans and having a good old chat with our patients throughout the day. But what happens when the next four to six weeks of your nursing journey…
Featured Image: Gustavo Frazao on Shutterstock Boys don’t cry. Stop acting like a little girl. Be a man. You’re a big sook. Suck it up. Do these phrases seem familiar? They are all examples of the harmful constructions of masculinity that contribute to why men are more likely to die earlier than women. This isn’t…
Featured Image: Arthimedes on Shutterstock As the rain continued to fall and the news was overrun with stories of the South Queensland and Northern New South Wales (NSW) floods, I found it natural to write about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following a natural disaster. From experience, we as health clinicians will with certainty see increases…
By Lucy Osborn MACN (ENL) This column, The Scrubs that Fit, is all about the highs and lows of being a junior nurse, from the perspective of an ACN Emerging Nurse Leader. The aim of these blog posts is to help ease the transition from university to grad years and beyond. Find Lucy on ACN’s neo and on…
Catelyn Richards MACN during her AusAid placement in the Solomon Islands in 2013 I wasn’t always as motivated to engage with the issue of climate change as I am now. As a teenager I was very much aware of the risks it posed to our world; and yet I never felt connected with the issue.…