Applications for the MCF Leadership Award Now Being Accepted!

On behalf of Lucy Bradley-Springer, Chair of the Selection Committee for the Margaret Comerford Freda Award for Editorial Leadership in Nursing Publication, I am pleased to announce that applications for the 2016 award are now being accepted.

MCF Award for Editorial Leadership in Nursing Publication

MCF Award for Editorial Leadership in Nursing Publication – 2015

The award was established in 2012 and presented for the first time at INANE 2012 in Montreal, Canada. The purpose of the award is to recognize outstanding achievements or contributions by an editor in pursuit of nursing publication.

Click here to learn more about the award. Click here to learn about award winners for the past four years. And last, click here to nominate a worthy colleague for this prestigious honor.

Nominations will be open until April 17, 2016. If you have questions or need more information, use the Contact Form at this website. All questions will be sent directly to the committee chair, Lucy Bradley-Springer.

Thank you for your support of the MCF Award!

Leslie

Follow Up on Student Authors

At INANE 2015, there was a report from Shawn Kennedy and colleagues on the survey done of INANE members about student authors and papers. Patricia Gonce Morton, Editor of the Journal of Professional Nursing, the official publication of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, was asked to “take the message back to the AACN.” She has done so and this is her report:

  • I met with the board of directors of AACN and discussed the issue.
  • I gave a report to all assembled at our conference last week (about 600 people) and addressed the issue.
  • I alerted all to my editorial this month in the Journal of Professional Nursing that includes a link to a publishing course I created while a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow.
  • The 12 module course can be used or adapted by any organization under the Creative Commons rule.  The first 11 modules focus on how to write a manuscript for publication in a journal and the last module is focused on how to be a manuscript reviewer.  The link to the course is: http://nursing.utah.edu/journalwriting.

Thank you, Trish, for your leadership and follow-up in this area. I encourage all potential authors, whether students, faculty, or clinicians, to read the editorial and take advantage of the resources that are available.

Program for INANE 2016 is Announced!

Greetings!

The Planning Committee for INANE 2016 has been hard at work for the past two months, lining up speakers for the general sessions at INANE 2016. We are excited about the presentations, which include:

  • Natasha McEnroe, director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in London will be the opening speaker at our Gala on Monday, August 1.
  • Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and a founder of AllTrials, will present on Missing Trials on Tuesday, August 2nd. If you are not familiar with Ben, you can watch his TED talks here and here.
  • A speaker from ORCID has been confirmed–the exact speaker will be announced when details are finalized. This session will also be on Tuesday, August 2nd.
  • Major Chris Carter will speak on the Oral Histories Project of the Defence Nursing Forum on Wednesday, August 3rd.
  • INANE 2016 will close with a formal COPE forum, organized by Linda Gough, executive director of COPE, and Geri Pearson and Charon Pierson, COPE Council board members.

You can see all details of the program here. What’s missing? The voice of INANE! While the general sessions have been planned, we need INANE members to submit abstracts for posters and breakout sessions. The Call for Abstracts is open now. Abstracts will be accepted until January 15, 2016. If you need ideas to get started, there are suggestions for potential topics which were noted in the evaluations from INANE 2015 listed on the Call for Abstracts page. As always, we ask that you be creative in your approach to your presentation, involve the audience in interactive activities, and think about how to take your presentation to the next level beyond “This is what I did.” The Abstract Review Committee is eager to get to work! No abstracts have been received yet–who will be the first?

Registration for INANE 2016 will open on October 15, 2016. Once again there will be early bird (until December 31, 2015) registration which is actually less than early bird was in Las Vegas! We believe that INANE 2016 is a great value, especially when you consider that the conference has been extended to a full day on Wednesday!

If you have questions or need more information, you can use the Contact Form to send them directly to me. On behalf of INANE 2016 host, Gary Bell, and the rest of the Planning Committee, I look forward to welcoming my INANE colleagues to London next summer!

Leslie

Boston Added to Our Conference Lineup for 2018!

This morning a mighty group of nursing journal editors “met” using a zoom.us video/audio connection to begin the process of planning for our 2018 conference in Boston!  Our first order of business – to affirm this location, and proceed with identifying a suitable venue.  Of course the Boston area is a high-rent district, so be prepared for prices that are a bit above what we have paid in the past, but the group is already hard at work gathering information about several different locations, and will find the best possible site on the basis of cost in a location that provides the kinds of access that we all have come to know and love (shopping, great food, local entertainment!!).

The Denver planning group is also getting close to signing a contract on a hotel site for 2017.  The details are not settled yet, but be prepared for a wonderful location with the best that Denver has to offer!

And of course London – coming up next for 2016!  The London planning group meets monthly on zoom.us – our group is stretched all the way from London to California and Gary is leading the way with fabulous plans for one of our best conferences ever (can they get any better, really??)!  The web site for 2016 will be ready to unveil in about 2-3 weeks, with details that will inspire you to start making reservations immediately!

We also have a group starting to form to explore the possibility of Cuba as the site for our 2019 conference. Leslie and I are going to Cuba in December with a MEDICC group; we will meet with publishers, journal editors, and nursing faculty and librarians while we are there, and have opened discussion with the MEDICC staff about the possibility of working with them to make local arrangements.  Watch this blog for more information!

If you want to join any of these planning groups, please use our contact form to let us know, and we will connect you with the group!

Peggy

INANE 2016: August 1-3, 2016 in London!

The dates for the 35th Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Nursing Editors have been announced! The conference will be held from August 1-3, 2016 in London, England.

A block of rooms will be available for INANE attendees at the Cumberland Hotel. Sessions for INANE will be held at the Royal College of Nursing. Gary Bell is the host for INANE 2016 and will be presenting “Top Ten Reasons to Attend INANE 2016” at this year’s conference in Las Vegas. In addition, the INANE 2016 conference logo will be unveiled at that time.

The website for the conference is under development and we anticipate it will be live (with registration open) sometime in September. The Call for Abstracts for poster and breakout sessions for INANE 2016 will commence when the website launches. Applications for the Mentoring Editors Awards for INANE 2016 will be available starting on October 1, 2015 and will be due by February 1, 2016.

Please use the Feedback Form to contact us if you have any questions or need more information about INANE 2016. In the meantime, stay tuned!

INANE 2015 Speakers Holding Reddit Chat and Webinar with Charon Pierson!

by Charon Pierson

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, co-founders of Retraction Watch, will be presenting to INANE attendees on August 4th at our upcoming annual meeting in Las Vegas August 3rd – 5th. Both speakers are in great demand and we are fortunate to have secured their presence at our conference. If you don’t know about Retraction Watch, you might want to attend a free webinar or Reddit chat featuring Ivan Oransky and INANE member Charon Pierson, who is also a COPE Council member. They will be co-presenting on two days in April on the topic of “Catching Errors: Peer Review and Retractions in Publishing.” The first venue is an “Ask Us Anything” chat on Reddit on April 15th from 12-1PM EDT. Here’s the announcement:

[Science AMA Series] We are Charon Pierson, journal editor and elected member of the Governing Council for the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. AUA about publication ethics and retractions.

To access a Reddit chat go to http://www.reddit.com/ and search on the title in the brackets above. You can also search on American Chemical Society, the hosts of the series and sort by New. The chat will be live during the time advertised and will then be archived on the Reddit site after the chat closes. Both Charon and Ivan will be answering questions from as many people as possible.

The second event is a live webinar, also hosted by the American Chemical Society, on April 16th from 2-3PM EDT. Ivan and Charon will be presenting a brief talk about catching errors and how to handle retractions in the literature. They will then take questions from the audience. The live webinar is free but the archived version will only be accessible to members of the American Chemical Society. Here’s the announcement:

We have all seen the headlines where unintentional errors and falsified data have caused papers to be retracted. These instances can damage the reputation of the researchers, journals and institutions that are associated with the research. Join us as Dr. Charon Pierson and Dr. Ivan Oransky discuss the efforts that are being made to combat this issue and expose the bad research as well as what could be changed to improve the review process.

To register for this event, go to http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/events/upcoming-acs-webinars/catching-errors.html

Both of these events will be of interest to nurse editors and a preview of what’s to come in Las Vegas!  If you have not registered yet for the conference, be sure to do so by the registration deadline of April 30th!  You can register after April 30th, but then the late registration fee applies — no exceptions!!!

Truth in Reporting: Straight Talk for The Good Nurse

NB: The following resources grew out of the INANE presentation by Charles Graeber and Diana Mason at INANE 2014 in Portland, ME. Faculty, editors, and other interested colleagues are free to use these resources, with proper credit to Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse, Diana J. Mason, PhD, RN, FAAN Co-Director, Center for Health, Media & Policy, Rudin Professor of Nursing, and INANE 2014.
~~
PART I: Editorial Notes Outline:

Takeaways:

  • In the book “The Good Nurse,” eight years of investigative journalism uncovers the shocking story of a serial killer nurse, and the hospital administrators who passed him on, hospital to hospital, for 16 years. It also highlights the attempts of several brave whistleblower “good nurses” to stop Cullen along the way.
  • Serial Killer Charles Cullen is in prison for what he did. Many of the administrators who passed him on got promoted.
  • New Health care employee reporting laws, designed to stop another serial killer like Charles Cullen, in fact treat truly “good nurses” like criminals.
  • Meanwhile it’s still business as usual for the health care executives.
  • We should know the truth and demand common sense laws that respect nurses, protect patients, and don’t force executives to choose between protecting their institution from lawsuits, and protecting patients from harm.

PART 2:

TALKING POINTS RE: LESSONS FROM THE GOOD NURSE

  • The book details how nurse Charles Cullen was able to selectively or randomly kill an admitted 40 patients, though expert estimates of the real number of Cullen’s victims to be closer to 400, making him the most prolific serial killer in United States history.
  • But as lurid as these details are, more troubling are the descriptions of how Cullen was able to go from hospital to hospital in Pennsylvania and New Jersey–often facilities with stellar reputations, including Magnet designation—without being reported to the police, the state boards of nursing, and state departments of health (until a coworker reported her suspicions to police, against the expressed wishes of her hospital’s administration and lawyers).
  • The book describes situations in which top executives and administrators stymied detectives’ investigations into the suspicious deaths, including misleading them about the medication system and record-keeping.
  • When Cullen’s actions (serious repeated nurse practice issues, delivery of non-proscribed meds, bizarre behavior, patient complaints) were uncovered by hospital authorities, he was either removed from the schedule, fired or allowed to resign. But never was he stopped.
  • Example: At one hospital, Cullen was the only suspect in a rash of insulin overdoses. He was removed from the schedule, and so applied for a job at another hospital, where he commenced overdosing patients. At another hospital, Cullen was caught red-handed by his fellow nurses, stashing empty vials of deadly paralytic drugs which he had used for murder during his shift. Outside council was brought in, and Cullen was allowed to resign, rather than be fired, so that he could receive a neutral recommendation.Cullen quickly found a new job, and began killing again.
  • Instead of opening themselves to outside scrutiny- at the risk of reputation, donor money and massive lawsuits- the hospitals, intentionally or otherwise, operated in a manner which protected the institution, but put their patients at risk.
  • When Cullen’s suspicious behavior was brought to the attention of the authorities by a whistle-blowing nurse, the hospital drove the nurse whistle-blower out of the state, and later, counter-sued families of patients who were suspected dying at Cullen’s hand, and have tried to intimidate the book’s author.
  • None of the hospital executives and administrators were held accountable for their actions or their failure to report Cullen in a timely fashion, if at all; several, including a risk management administrator who obstructed a police investigation, were promoted.
  • There has never been a criminal investigation into the actions of these administrators, but it’s not too late; nurse leaders and patient advocates can still demand the truth. (Somerset County NJ Police detectives also called for a Grand Jury).
  • New Jersey and Pennsylvania quickly passed broad laws (see below) in the wake of Cullen’s prosecution and life jail sentence, but there appears to be little enforcement of these laws requiring hospitals to report a dismissed employee.While ineffective at inspiring change at a corporate level, they appear to be overloading the nursing board review process, and can brand the career of an inexperienced nurse who makes a simple mistake.
  • Questions that this book raises include:
  1. How do we prevent another Cullen from going undiscovered in our midst?
  2. What policies and procedures are needed to ensure that health care organizations take the proper and ethical actions that are needed to prevent employees from continuing to do harm to patients?
  3. How do we tell nurses to blow the whistle on unsafe practices when their employers skirt doing so, even when required by law to report these?
  4. What are the local and national conversations that need to happen around institutional priorities (patient welfare versus financial health of the institution) accountability for patient safety in health care?
  5. What are the ethical dilemmas that nurse administrators face when becoming aware of potential criminal activity with their facilities, but are told by executive leadership that they must not investigate further, nor report it? How does this nurse weigh the legal requirement for reporting unsafe practitioners versus the institution’s interest in maintaining its fiscal health by preventing the information from becoming public?
  6. Exercise> CASE STUDIES: Students form groups to report and present case studies related to the practice and ethical issues raised.

PART 3:

A Closer Look: Systemic Issues Uncovered in The Good Nurse: The Enabling Patterns of Dysfunction

The investigation revealed several factors which contributed to perpetuating Cullen’s nursing/murder career for 16 years and 9 different health care facilities.

  • Hospitals were slow to react, understandably fearful of lawsuits, and repeatedly chose laborious and ineffective internal investigations, rather than outside attention from regulatory agencies and detectives. During these investigations, Cullen continued working, and killing patients.
  • Cullen exploited the space between the business of health care and the care itself.  In moving Cullen out of their employ and back into the job pool, many of the hospital administrators who dealt with the “Cullen problem” did their job as business people, but not their duty as patient advocates.
  • The trend toward outsourcing and use of staffing agencies increasingly allowed hospitals to treat nurses as disposable employees, and discouraged recognition or ownership of the Cullen problem.
  • Nurses who voiced concerns with Cullen’s behavior were marginalized, ignored or dismissed. Those who spoke up said they did so at the risk of their jobs. The whistle blowers identified in the book not only left the hospitals at which they had worked, and also the state.
  • Information flow was guarded, making problem solving slow, if impossible.
  • Outside investigators, who usually lacked familiarity with the healthcare setting and terms of art, were not given full information and didn’t even know what to ask for.
  • Family members of Cullen’s victims were sometimes not told of overdose levels of drugs found in their loved one’s bodies, and thus did not request autopsy.
  • Outside agencies, in the rare instances they were contacted regarding Cullen-related incidents, did not communicate with each other, or across state lines.
  • Penalties for non-reportage of sentinel events were rare and minimal, especially compared to  the perception that potential lawsuits would result from admitting to the problem.

The Good Nurse” is available in hardbook, paperback, and e-book versions, anywhere that fine books are sold.

Applications for the Mentoring Editors Awards are Now Being Accepted!

Hello Everyone!

Applications for the Suzanne Smith Mentoring Editors Awards for INANE 2015 are now being accepted. Click here to be taken to the application page.

SS_photoThis Awards program was inaugurated for INANE 2014. Named in honor of long-time INANE colleague and friend to many, Suzanne Smith, the awards recognize her passion for mentoring and supporting others. The awards provide complimentary registration for four aspiring or novice editors to attend INANE 2015. In addition, each awardee is paired with a mentor who provides guidance and networking opportunities before, during, and after the conference.

Last year’s Mentoring Editors Awards program was extremely successful. You can read about the award winners here. In an informal evaluation, the awardees had high praise for their experience at the conference as well as the guidance of their mentors. A few of their comments include:

Attending INANE 2014 was very valuable for my insight about what it takes and what it means to be an editor. It provided an overview of the role and challenges in the editorial world.

I met the other candidates who received the awards and I think, based on my modest experience as a researcher and future editor, that the awards were well-deserved.

The conference was very helpful. I adore my mentor–she has been extraordinary.

The Mentoring Editors Awards are supported by INANE members and others who have generously contributed to the Suzanne Smith Development Fund. While we have enough money to support this program for the immediate future, donations are always gratefully accepted. Click here to donate to the fund for 2014-2015 and be listed on the honor roll of donors!

If you are interested in applying for one of the Mentoring Editors Awards, here are a few important details:

  • Applications are open now and will be accepted until February 1, 2015. Winners will be announced on March 1, 2015.
  • Award winners will receive a complimentary registration to INANE 2015 (value $495) and are expected to attend the conference. Additional expenses, including travel, hotel, meals, and incidentals are the responsibility of the award winner.
  • The award is not transferable.
  • The program is designed for new or aspiring editors, authors, peer reviewers, and others who have an interest in dissemination of nursing knowledge through the published literature. Seasoned or experienced editors are not eligible. Note: if you are seasoned editor who would like to serve as a mentor, contact Leslie to express your interest!
  • Winners will be asked to provide a photograph and brief bio to be posted on the INANE 2015 website.

If you need more information, please contact me using the Contact Form or by email: Leslie@medesk.com

Thank you! We look forward to reading the applications in the coming months!

On behalf of the Mentoring Editors Awards Committee for INANE 2015,

Leslie Nicoll, Chair
Lucy Bradley-Springer
Susan Carroll
Jan Fulton

Nurse Author & Editor: September Issue Published!

smaller bannerI am happy to announce that the September 2014 issue of Nurse Author & Editor has been published and is available online. If you are not already a subscriber, you can register at the website–the newsletter is available at no charge. I encourage all INANE members and friends to subscribe.

This is an exciting issue for me, in several ways. First, it is my first issue as the Editor, taking over the role from Dr. Marilyn Oermann. Second, I am very pleased with the line-up in the issue, with excellent articles written by Cynthia Saver, Thomas Long, Jacqueline Owens, and Thomas Long.

ShowImage

Dr. Sally Thorne

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the lead article is Predatory Publishing: What Editors Need to Know written by the INANE Predatory  Publishing Practices Collaborative. This article is a direct outcome from our discussion at the INANE meeting in August around issues related to open access, predatory publishers, and traps for unwary authors. It is exciting that our group has gone from discussion to publication in less than seven weeks. I am proud to share this article with INANE and the larger writing and publishing community of nurses. I offer my thanks to the members of the Collaborative for providing content and thoughtful comments and special thanks to Sally Thorne, Editor of Nursing Inquiry for her leadership in pulling this together so quickly and professionally.

As we discussed at the INANE meeting, editors are free to use this document to craft editorials for their respective journals. Similar to the Future of Nursing initiative a few years ago, the goal is to have these editorials reach beyond our members and inform nurses in a broader way about the issues that must be carefully considered around open access and predatory publishers.

If you are an editor and want to use some (or all) of this article in an editorial for your journal, you have permission to do so. There are just three requests that go with use:

  • Please reference the article as follows:
    • INANE Predatory Publishing Practices Collaborative. (2014). Predatory Publishing: What Editors Need to Know, Nurse Author & Editor24(3), 1.
  • Please include a link to the original article:
  • Please send a citation and copy of the editorial to me when it is published. I will keep track and have a report at the INANE 2015 meeting of how widely this content was distributed.

As I say in my Editorial for the issue, I have a goal to strengthen the relationship between INANE and Nurse Author & Editor and I believe publishing this article is a big step in that direction. I look forward to hearing from my INANE colleagues about their editorials and overall thoughts on this initiative.

Leslie

Leslie H. Nicoll, PhD, MBA, RN
Editor, Nurse Author & Editor
Editor-in-Chief, CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing

Report from INANE 2014 in the COPE Digest

INANE member and elected member of the COPE Council, Charon Pierson, had a nice write up about INANE 2014 in the most recent issue of the COPE Digest. I have copied it here but you should go to the original site to see the pictures that were included–and read the rest of this month’s digest. Interesting news about retractions plus a report about the North American COPE Seminar that was held in Philadelphia, written by Geri Pearson. –LHN

INANE 2014: Nurse Editors Rate COPE Forum

Report from COPE Council member Charon Pierson

The first live COPE Forum was held at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Nurse Editors (INANE) in Portland, Maine, on August 5, 2014. Myself and COPE Council member Geri Pearson, both of us long-time INANE members and elected COPE Council members, hosted the afternoon session. Geri and I presented a brief overview of COPE to about 40 attendees, including a session on how COPE can help nurse editors. We have found that some editors who are members of COPE do not know they are members, nor do they know about all the useful resources membership provides. We also provided some individual consultations to those with particular questions and issues.

After the presentation, we asked for those editors who had submitted cases prior to the meeting to present their cases and updates. All of the editors attending and presenting cases were members of COPE. The cases included how to deal with an editor who was not responding to emails about a manuscript in the publication queue; how to deal with repeated submissions from students at one university where there was a lack of faculty supervision and consistently poor quality of manuscripts (including plagiarism); a case of duplicate submission without any verbatim plagiarism (same data prepared for a different audience); and how to deal with a publisher’s refusal to honor the STM Permissions Agreement. The cases will be added to the COPE case database in the near future.

The feedback from the attendees was very positive and we learned that many nurse editors are consistently using and relying on the COPE flowcharts. There was, however, not as much awareness of some of the other resources COPE provides.

A few other highlights of the INANE conference included the opening presentation by museum director and chief curator Jessica Nicoll on Maine Through Artists’ Eyes; this follows the INANE tradition of exploring art, culture and history in the host city. A plenary session by Jeffrey Beall and Carolyn Yucha described some of more egregious predatory publishing and conference events in the nursing world. In addition to all the breakout sessions on nuts and bolts topics related to publishing, we also heard from true crime writer Charles Graeber who documented the life of a serial killer nurse in the book The Good Nurse, and we closed with poetry from Maine poet Richard Blanco, who wrote the 2013 inaugural poem ‘One Today‘ for the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. And it wouldn’t be New England without a bay cruise and lobster bake!