Re: are southern nurses better educated than northern educated nurse?
There are differences, but they are not universal. You also may what to qualify what you mean about care, as well as about what is southern and northern.
I will say that hospitals in the north generally are more technilogically up to date. However, that does not necessarily translate into better care. The vast majority of patients do not need and most illnesses do not require that, and it raises the cost of care.
Also, some times technology is a mixed blessing. Just because we can do it does not mean that we should do it. Should your 80 year old grandma with pancreatic Ca have the latest whipple and the most up-to-date chemo that will probably just make her miserable, or the gentle hands on care with fewer sticks/cuts/tests.
An example: Many facilities have strict parameters as to whether they will do a bone marrow transplant on someone with leukemia...taking into account whether induction/consolidation chemo has cleared the bone marrow, treatment compliance, age, comorbidities, performance status, etc. Research based evidence have demonstrated that doing BMT outside those parameters does not improve survival, and can be detrimental to QOL. Yet I guarantee that many pts leave and find someone with the technology that will transplant them, using state of the art technology. BMT is dangerous, stressful and has serious repercussions for the rest of the pts life.
I have found that being on the receiving end of care in the north and in the south, I received more personalized care, and was more comfortable with care in the south. There was more of a hands on rather than a tech feel to it. But that is also me, and likely d/t my southern upbringing.
I will say as a patient and as a nurse, sometimes the attitudes of the staff put me off. I worked at a top ten facility in PA that requires a BSN now to work in it as well as does state of the art nursing research. The backbiting/cliquishness/rudeness was very disturbing. I saw several nurses (experienced and new) quit after getting eaten alive and spit out. There was an elderly MD looking for a chart once, as a matter of being gracious - I helped him find it and got talked down for it.
I worked in NYC, and routinely dealt with staffers that slept on the night shift and would not "lower" themselves to shower a pt. And complained that when I showered a terminally ill cancer pt, so that she would look good for her last Thanksgiving, that I was "spoiling" her and that the family should pay a private duty to do that for her.
I also worked at one of the Boston (read Harvard) hospitals, where an attending slammed me for my southern origins. She was being introduced to me and ask me where I was from and learned BMT, I said Georgia. She responded with a , "You know ANYTHING about BMT, being from Georgia?". A few weeks later, she wanted them to permanently hire me. The irony.
By the same token, the northern hospitals tend to not tolerate bad behavior by visitors or MDs. I saw badly behaving visitors carried out by security, for things the southern hospitals would require staff tolerate.
By the same token many southern facilities coddle their MDs/visitors and tolerate bad/dangerous/unacceptable behavior from them.
As a general rule, more northern facilities are unionized than southern ones, so there are generally better ratios and more staff benies in the northern ones. Though this also had a certain increase in slack behavior (the nurses that slept for a 2 hour stint each night were in a union facility in NY). Pay rates are also generally higher and there are fewer for profit hospitals.
The other is what is north and what is south? Many people consider Johns Hopkins (consistantly rated top in the country) a southern hospital, others consider int more northern.
The other issue. I worked at the NIH with some of the best medical minds available. And I can tell that, no matter how "educated" someone is, that does not mean that they have any other skills. Some of those scientists were also some of the people most lacking in common sense and people skills that I have ever met in my life.
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