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Nurse activists have these suggestions for getting involved:
Join an association. Nursing associations are great resources for ideas, networking, and sharing concerns and solutions. They also provide important moral support.
Put your ideas in writing. Having a written proposal shows you have researched a problem and thought about solutions. Supervisors and managers are more likely to take your suggestions seriously if you have put obvious work into them.
Be persistent. Changing people’s minds can take years. Don’t be discouraged by the first “no’s” and “we can’ts.”
Build community alliances. Human rights groups, crisis centers, parents, educators, social workers, and law enforcement officials can be good allies. They will welcome the expertise of a nurse, and you will be able to show your cause is important to a wide range of people.
Pay attention to new legislation. Often changes in laws will spur administrators or local officials to action on problems they previously ignored or put off. |
Rowse decided to use her training and education as a nurse to protect other children and parents from shaken baby syndrome. Through the Kierra Harrison Foundation for Child Safety, she began working to teach health care providers, law enforcement officials, social workers, and anyone else in contact with children how to recognize shaken baby syndrome. She’s worked with prosecutors in trials involving deaths and injuries of shaken babies.
Rowse teaches high school classes about child abuse and shaken baby syndrome. She gives workshops for nurses about how to recognize and report it. She has pushed for state-guided regulations for child care facilities.
Almost three years ago, she founded the National Shaken Baby Syndrome Coalition, a support group for families. Last year she attended the first North American shaken baby syndrome conference in Montreal as a representative of the coalition.
Babies who are shaken don’t look like abused children, she says. They have no bruises or cuts or other signs of abuse, but they have severe head trauma that can cause brain damage and death. This is why nurses and other health care providers need to know how to ask the right questions, she says.
Until three or four years ago, many nurses and physicians had never heard of shaken baby syndrome, says Rowse. She herself had never heard of it until Kierra’s death. Her ignorance still haunts her as she wonders how many cases she might have missed as an ED nurse.
“I think about it all the time — that there were things that I missed,” she says. “But I just didn’t know. I should have known, but nobody ever talked about shaken baby syndrome.”
As awareness of the syndrome grows, Rowse hopes, incidents will drop as dramatically as those of sudden infant death syndrome did when people became aware of SIDS and took steps to prevent it. But, adds Rowse, “Nurses have to stand up and say to a physician or an administrator or even their nurse manager, ‘This is where we need to go.’ Unless nurses work together, change is not going to happen.”
Cathryn Domrose is a senior staff writer for NurseWeek.
To comment on this story, e-mail editorSC@nurseweek.com. |
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