Getting Published: One Nurse’s Journey

I would like to share with you my first publishing experience.?

It all started with Nursing Scholars Day at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, now known as the SHINE Conference. In 2017, My colleagues and I made a poster titled, “A Shared Governance Approach to Implementing Change of Shift Huddle.” I was super proud of our work - so much so I took a photo with our poster (see below)!?

There is something special about seeing your name in print.

During the poster breakout session, our departmental Director of Nursing visited our poster and encouraged us to publish our work. At first, we were not sure what that entailed, but, thanks to Nursing Scholars Day, we learned.?My team attended a break out session about getting published and took copious notes. We were pleased to learn our poster already addressed many of the required manuscript sections: title, abstract, background, literature review, methods, results, and discussion. Publishing seemed like something we could do!??

I decided to undertake the role of primary author, a daunting, but fulfilling role. I spent days upon days translating our poster into a manuscript. By the way, a manuscript is just a fancy term for a paper that has not yet been published.?My teammates were my rocks throughout the writing process. They kept the paper on track and helped me resolve any errors.

We finally finished our manuscript and submitted it to The Journal of Nursing Care Quality.

But, little did I know, we were not even close to being finished! One day, we received an exciting email: the journal would consider publishing our manuscript, as long as we made some revisions. The revisions list was so overwhelming, I almost lost hope.??

We managed to tackle the entire list - one revision at a time - and re-submitted our manuscript for review. Next thing I knew, the journal sent another long list of revisions. After months of this process, and another resubmission, we finally got the email we were hoping for: accepted without revisions!

You can read our full article, here.

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About the Author:?Holley Farley, M.S.N., R.N. is the Nursing Coordinator for Clinical Quality at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Holley has served?as CUSP champion,?safety ambassador, and quality improvement champion.?Holley is passionate about quality improvement initiatives.?