Hello fellow Nurse, this is your weekly handoff. Some quick and dirty nursing news that’s worth sharing. Enjoy!

Something to absolutely not believe

Pop quiz: what do you call an NHS pediatric nurse who clocks out of her shift and into a royal wedding? Apparently, you call her “family.” On June 6th, nurse Harriet Sperling married Peter Phillips—King Charles’s nephew and the late Queen Elizabeth II’s eldest grandson—which means the person hanging your IV today could be curtsying at Windsor tomorrow. She’s reportedly keeping her nursing career, so somewhere out there a charge nurse is texting actual royalty about swapping a weekend shift. We are not crying, you’re crying.

Something to make you furious

Four nurses at St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois have filed a class-action lawsuit against owners Prime Healthcare and Ascension, alleging chronic understaffing forced them to stand by and watch patients suffer with no way to safely intervene. The complaint describes moral injury severe enough to cause lasting emotional distress—the kind of thing that happens when budgets, not bedside clinicians, decide how many patients one nurse can hold. We have all felt that gut-punch of too many patients and not enough hands; these four decided to put it in front of a judge. Here’s hoping it lights a fire under every system still treating safe staffing as optional.

Something to make us nurses proud

When an Arizona mom learned her newborn daughter had a limb difference, the labor-and-delivery nurse assigned to her birth at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix turned out to have the exact same limb difference. In a single moment, a frightening unknown became living proof that her little girl could grow up to do anything—including, maybe, becoming the nurse who holds someone else’s hand one day. No scheduler could ever plan an assignment that perfect. Days like this are the whole reason we keep showing up.

Something from a Subscriber

“I’m a night-shift ER nurse, and last month one of our frequent flyers—we’ll call him ‘the regular’—rolled in for the hundredth time with the same complaint and the same eye-rolls from the new grads. During the dead stretch around 4 a.m. I finally sat down and asked what was actually going on at home. Turns out the waiting room was the only place anyone had talked to him since his wife died. We didn’t cure his loneliness with a banana bag, but I got him plugged into a grief group and a social worker before discharge—and he hasn’t bounced back in six weeks. Sometimes the best intervention isn’t anything in the Pyxis.” — Dana R., ER RN, Ohio

We want to hear more from you! Submit your funniest or strangest or most heart warming nursing stories and we will pick one to share every week! This will be shared anonymously- so don’t be afraid to add some humor and flare and cursing, just like we love here!

Please submit all stories to: [email protected]

Please be conscious of HIPAA and omit any PPI or detail that may give hints to the people, hospital, and nurses involved in your story. We may slightly alter your story or change names for this reason. Your story may also be shortened and slightly altered to fit the size of the blog. Happy writing!!

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