[HazeK]

How about sending the results of the poll to several different organizations?
Like: The American Hospital Association
The American Medical Association
The Associated Press
AARP
Congress
etc!!!!

[AprilRN24]

I work in Critical Care and it is nothing to come to work and have at least 3 patients, sometimes four or five CRITICAL CARE patients. Yes, this includes, vents, IABPS, etc., etc. Most days, I leave work feeling like I need to be taken care of. And are my patients cared for? To the best of my ability, that's all that I can say. Yes, the nursing shortage is dramatically risking patient care. The hospital that I work for will not consider LPN or CNA's to assist in the critical care areas, so the RN's have TOTAL care of the patients that we are assigned. Being a charge nurse and having to assign co-workers with this crap makes you feel even better about being a nurse.

[oramar]

If you go up to the topic, "Doctors Find Out About the Nursing Shortage" you will see a post by Charles Smith that says that a non telemetry trained agency nurse was pulled to telemetry. Apparently this nurse failed to recognize a sever brady situation and a patient died. I did not personally witness this but when I was still working on telemetry an ICU nurse told me that a patient had suffered series of mishaps that resulted in a his death while in ICU. There was a lawsuit and when the hospital reviewed their records they realized the patient had not had one single ICU nurse assigned to him in the week preceding his death. Managment was apparently shaking in their boots over the situation. I was lucky I was not one of them because by that time I had started to rebel and was refusing to go to ICU when they tried to pull me there. The reason I asked the ICU nurse what was going on was that I had noticed they had suddenly stopped pulling non ICU nurses to ICU. Do you know that from the moment managment decided it was time to stop pulling to ICU from telementry and med/surg because they feared lawsuits they always managed to find an ICU nurse somewhere. Up until that point they had always protested it was not possible to find one and that was the reason they had to pull. So anyway, the answer to the question is Yes, patient safety is being compromised.

[Sharon]

For the past four years I have administered healthcare services to a population of 26,000 employees plus their families. The number one cause of death, disability, and healthcare cost for this group is medical, nursing, and pharmacist error. In the four years I have been with this employer, I haven’t seen a change in rates. I don’t have enough information to determine how many of these cases are due to staff shortages. I do know that many of the pharmacy errors are due to staff shortages.

I am aware of only one specific case involving the nursing shortage with a very bad outcome. A kidney transplant was recently cancelled because there were not enough scrub nurses available to hold the operation. The organ went to another recipient in a different state.

If I become aware of a participant selecting care that will require hospitalization, I make the following recommendations:

1. Ask the hospital what the patient nurse ratio is for each unit you will be in. (I explain to them how many different units they could be in based on their diagnosis and procedure to be done.)
2. What are the training levels of the nurses who will be caring for you?
3. Identify at least two friends or relatives who can act as your DPOA and will be able to stay with you the entire time you are hospitalized.
4. If you can not locate friends or family members please hire private duty RN’s. (And I do recommend if necessary they borrow the money from their retirement programs if necessary.)
5. If a participant is hospitalized with one of our “top ten” diagnosis or a rare disease, I will do a visit without notice. I am still finding hospitalized participants in untreated acute distress in 50% of the time.
6. I do track good outcomes and recommend those facilities to other participants.

[oramar]

dear Sharon, that sounds like an interesting program you are administering, very result oriented. The healthcare industry could use more of that.