My facility, like many, has increased staffing ratios in all departments in response to the economic pressures. Meanwhile, the Joint Commission continues to mandate supposed safety concerns, with mostly extra documentation demands and other inconveniences. They fail to address the elephant in the room, nurse/patient ratios.
I think bedside nursing has become less safe. From the ER point of view, we are less able to safely monitor patients, there is more friction with the inpatient nurses as they are too bogged down to receive patients. There is a cold war going on between some of our ER nurses and floor nurses, causing a big distraction and detracting from teamwork for the greater good.
Meanwhile, we're getting ready for the Joint Commission inspection and are going to be temporarily inconvenienced by their nonsensical edicts. No IV buckets to be left out on the counters of the nurses station, and other rules that are so minor compared with the real problems that we are dealing with. Of course, like other facilities, we have to spend money to hires nurses to make sure that our charting pleases them, that we fill in the many mandatory charting prompts to their satisfaction.
Nursing has become a bureaucratic mess, bogged down in more and more red tape than ever before. All this to be accomplished with fewer nurses at the bedside, and more nurses behind the scene. Insurance companies and the government are running things, and hospital administrators focused on the bottom line. If we keep going down this road, I think we are going to implode.
