[oramar]

Originally Posted by everydaynurse

There is another practice out there I think all should know about. A hospital here just got rid of several employees who were close to retirement and had a history of ever having a workmen comp claim, which the supervisors make you fill out. Cheaper to get rid of long term employees and hire new ones. The old employees have too many vacation days accumulated over the years and accumulated sick leave. This makes for loss of productive work hours. Medicine is now run like all of corporations to maximize profits. In other countries across the globe this is not the case. As long as big business can come in and control our health system, things will only get worse and nurses will leave or be pushed out of nursing at the bedside. Join your organizations so they may have a strong lobby in the legislator realm as AMA and others have.

Their pensions should be vested and their 401K belongs to them. So they should not lose those but I know the loss of health and other types of insurance can be a blow, not to mention loss of income.

[Vito Andolini]

Originally Posted by 4rom2bRN

When I was working at a local hospital in chicago. I see the nurses' frustration with the new technology... computer charting. It takes them twice as long as paper charting. Most of the time the computer freezes and when that happens the whole unit goes to he__. Not only that, if you don't have a particular med. in your drawer i have to pick it up from pharmacy. When that happens, I am sitting there waiting for the medication for almost 30 minutes or more. And please don't ever have only one nurse aide working on the unit. That really guarantees a bad day for everyone. There is no easy fix for the crisis we are about to face. My only suggestion is to talk with your state representative, and hopefully they will listen to what you have to say. If you really feel the problem is important, anyway.

There is an easy fix. It's called having nurses do the staffing. Get rid of those who care only about the facility's prestige and Press Ganey scores and profit margin and how big the executives' corner offices are and put nurses back in charge. We are the ones at the bedside. We are the ones who know when patients are going bad.

We need to be able to stop waiting on family members and concerning ourselves with customer service issues and be able to attend to the patients whose lives are in our hands.

Hospitals are not hotels. We are here to save lives, not get blankets and coffee for visitors or run to Pharmacy for meds or to Central Supply for equipment and supplies.

We are not here to nurse computers, we should not be having to hunt down our assistants who are out smoking or fear maltreatment or ridicule for calling doctors.

When nurses are back in charge, things will improve greatly. Will it be perfect? No. There will still be errors, bad judgment calls, or even malevolent rogue nurses. But, over all, things will greatly improve.