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

Something to absolutely not believe

A Pennsylvania grand jury report is making the rounds this week, and it reads like a horror movie script. A registered nurse allegedly walked into a county-run nursing home in Nazareth, PA, shut herself in a resident’s room for roughly two hours, and performed what she called an exorcism on a nonverbal, bedridden elderly woman, insisting there were demons inside her. Police say they found her with her fingers down the resident’s throat, and she’s accused of stuffing towels and clothing into the woman’s mouth and repeatedly striking her in the back. The kicker: the victim’s roommates reportedly spent more than 30 minutes trying to get anyone to respond before officers had to physically break up the assault. The nurse was sent for a psych eval and now faces criminal charges, and the same grand jury report flagged the facility for staff-on-resident assaults, wandering residents, and conditions bad enough to rack up 14 Medicare deficiencies in 2025 alone.

Something to make you furious

As of September 1, ChatGPT is officially living inside Epic at a handful of pilot hospitals, including UCSF and HCA facilities, where it can pull a patient’s notes, labs, and med list and spit out a summary of what changed and what matters. OpenAI says physicians rated 99.1% of the tested responses as safe. Physicians. Not one nurse is named anywhere in OpenAI’s testing or announcements, even though nurses are the ones who will be living in that chart 12 hours a day. And here’s the part that really stings: it’s read-only, so it can summarize the chart but can’t chart, can’t help with orders, and does absolutely nothing about the documentation burden nurses have been begging for help with. With 94 of the 100 biggest health systems running Epic, what happens at these pilot sites is coming to a unit near you, whether anyone asks you or not.

Something to make us nurses proud

Every nurse who has ever re-done a central line dressing because it got soaked, snagged, or peeled up by a squirmy patient, this one’s for you. Brett Garcia, a PICU nurse turned nurse anesthesiology resident at TCU, got sick of watching sterile dressings get ruined and unplanned dressing changes pile up, so he invented a fix. MudFlap is a clear overlay with a non-adhesive center that sits on top of the existing central line dressing, shields it from moisture, secretions, and everyday bumps, and can simply be swapped out when it gets dirty without disturbing the sterile dressing underneath. Last month it took the top $15,000 prize at AANA’s Rm8 iNoV8 pitch competition in Boston, and it’s now headed into further testing with AANA’s innovation lab. Bedside nurses solving bedside problems is exactly what we love to see.

Something from a Subscriber

“I’ve been a night shift med-surg nurse for eleven years, and I have one rule: I never tell patients when I’m about to go on break. Last week I had a sweet 80-something gentleman, a retired mailman, who could not sleep to save his life. Around 3 a.m. I finally sat down in the break room with the sad turkey sandwich I’d packed, and about four minutes later I hear the slow squeak of a walker coming down the hall. It’s him. He’d unplugged his IV pump, wheeled it out with him, and tracked me down because, in his words, ‘nobody should eat alone at 3 in the morning.’

He sat with me for the rest of my break and told me about delivering mail through the blizzard of ’78. I got written up for the unplugged pump. Worth it.”

— Danielle R., Med-Surg RN, Ohio

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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