Welcome

Welcome back to Communique, the newsletter of the Center for Ethics and Human Rights of the American Nurses Association! This newsletter, which started in the Winter of 1992 in hard copy and last appeared in 1997, now has a new "face." Our new online version of Communique,  renamed Ethics and Human Rights: Issues Update, will appear several times a year and will consist of Feature Articles, Case Studies and News Briefs.

Our first issue this year features the fine work of two individuals, Brenda Recchia Jeffers, PhD, RN and Tamara Cyhan, RN, BSN. Professor Jeffers is an associate professor of medical surgical nursing at the Mennonite College of Nursing at Illinois State University, and Tamara Cyhan is a clinical staff nurse at Georgetown University Medical Center. Both Brenda and Tamara served as our first two summer interns to the Center for Ethics and Human Rights last summer and we will be offering our intern experience again this summer.

In this issue, you will see discussions of important topics that directly impact staff nurses, namely, the changing face of healthcare resulting from the proliferation of genetic information and the challenges posed by relieving pain at the end of life. Professor Jeffers' excellent short articles on these topics are accompanied by a case study involving adequate pain relief for a pregnant patient and a report of a meeting with nurses from Romania, Albania and Macedonia both by Tamara Cyhan.

We hope that you enjoy this first online edition of the Ethics and Human Rights: Issues Update and look forward to your responses to this and to subsequent editions.

Sincerely,

Gladys B. White, Ph.D., R.N., Editor
Angela Thompson-Smith, Production Editor