Nurses not immune to sick economy

Hospitals are worried about cuts in funding. The present Health care bill proposes to help pay for universal health care by cutting reimbursement for medicare and medicaid patients. Unfortunately Hospitals now do not get enough reimbursement to cover the cost of care of many Medicare and Medicaid patients. Further cut could be devastating. One quick way to save money is to increase nurses workloads, now a Nurse will have to care for eight patients instead of six. The Hospital saves money by having to pay fewer nurses, but the patients don't get the care they deserve and the Nurses get burned out quick. I saw this happen in the mid ninetys when their was talk about universal care. I don't understand how goverment officials expect Hospitals to cover more patients for less money.

"m.ernst wrote:
Is anybody looking into the fact that the Hospitals instead of hiring new nurses are just increasing the work load of there existing nurses! Thus they increase there bottom line. Also unfortunately this increases the stress on the nurses and the chances of mistakes happening. Mr. Newbart should be looking into nurse staffing instead of putting out an article which doesn't address where the problem really is!"


The company I am currently working for does exactely that. They work three nurses, where there should be four, two where there should be three, etc. No matter what it does to the residents or staff. This has gone on for the two years I have worked there, so the economy is just their most recent excuse. Nurses come to work there, find out about the working conditions then leave. It's like a revolving door. I have stayed there so long because it's a few blocks from where I live and I work only PRN. The bad thing is they will not admit they are doing this. They act like they just can't figure out why no one wants to work for them. The company has 20+ nursing homes in South Texas. We need three to five more nurses on staff at any given time. At the beginning of August we had 30+ open shifts on the schedule.

The thing that makes me mad is they cut staff when the merely HEAR talk about cutting medicare reimbursements.