Administration is taking no prisoners

[walk6miles]

In the late 90's I took my first travel assignment in Baltimore. As a travel nurse I watched with complete shock and disbelief while the administration of a large well known hospital literally "fired" all of it's nursing staff and replaced each member of staff with a travel nurse. It was bloody awful and wrong, wrong, wrong. Critical care nurses are different; tough, intelligent, resilient and most times tough to please. We want our patients safely tucked in and healing as we watch them. We want the patient safe and comfortable and the families in and out and we all have our own ideas of what our patient can tolerate and what we as caregivers can tolerate as well.

The facility in which I have worked for ten years has begun a campaign that is so undermining and dangerous to patient safety that I just cannot believe there is one sane person left in the admnistrative offices. In the past six months, administration has fired/terminated at least twelve of the hospital's most experienced and dedicated critical care nurses. Additionally, these same administrators are using the shabbiest excuses to terminate said nurses; the morale in the entire buillding is the lowest I have ever seen. The latest disgusting episode is so painful to explain that let it be said the new nurse who participated in trumping up the charge of patient abuse needs to check her character (I think she left it in an alley somewhere). Achieving charge by deliberately ruining the reputation (and placing another nurse's license at risk) is wrong, wrong, wrong. By the way, telling a slightly confused patient that they must stop trying to smack their nurse in the face or have their wrists restrained is at best an effort to keep the patient safely in bed and on oxygen and I would be shocked if anyone out there can say they have never tried to persuade a patient to remain in bed on monitoring equipment. The one nurse who is the biggest offender (if asked if I would let that particular nurse care for a family member the answer is NO NO NO).

To finish this thread, let me say the nurses removed were the most experienced and hard-working; those remaining are new and just gathering their experiences. They don't deserve to be saddled with three critical patients in ICU. May God help us all.