By now, most of us have read about, heard about, discussed, seen the picture, etc., of the nursing student who posted a picture on Facebook of herself with a placenta.  While we may have differing opinions about the ethics involved, whether HIPAA was violated, or whether the punishment of expulsion was too severe, the lessons to be learned are the same - think before sending anything out there into the realm of the world wide web, proceed cautiously before clicking that “submit” or “post” button, and consider the effects and possible repercussions of your actions.

Today, this nursing student, who was scheduled to graduate this May, will be taking action against her school and the involved faculty. I’ll be following the case, how about you?

Last spring, when we entered this new world of social media, it was quite a new experience for most of us at NursingCenter.com. We did our research, enlisted some help, and then got our feet wet with a Facebook page and Twitter account.

Back in August of 2009, we posted one of our first polls on Facebook. None of our polls really ever got much of a response; perhaps our topics weren't that enticing or it was just easier to comment on a wall post than to actually vote in a poll. Somehow (I'll admit that this was not my intention initially!) one of our polls became a box on our "wall" page. This poll caught my attention recently as I was perusing the list of our latest fans. What a surprise when I saw the amount of responses that had accumulated over the past months.

We've had 286 responses to "Do you think you were destined to be a nurse?" After getting 10 to 20 responses on several other polls, I found 286 to be impressive. But what I find even more impressive is that 83% of the respondents said "Absolutely!", while only 3% voted for "Don't think so." Fourteen percent replied "Maybe - never really thought about it."

So, now I ask you, our blog readers, do you think you were destined to be a nurse?