Areas to work in

[Jay-Z]

Call me crazy but sometimes i get the feelings that if hospital planners listenned to the Nurses and Doctors and of course other health care workers then our hospital s would be ideal. Before i left my job to attend UNiversity i worked at Ashford ands St Peters Hospitals NHS Trust . These are situated nrear Heathrow Airport and the other one 17 miles away from that.

Ashford is a small 200 bed elective hospital, generally known as the limpet or parastie hospital. St Peters is the larger 400 bedded acute hospital where i worked.

i worked all over the hospital including HDU and OIRU, as well as acute medicine and medical step- down

the amount of bureaucracy in my hospital was phenomenol. for instance:

remember the good old days (in the UK) when Night Sisters, were called NIght Sisters.

Well of course many NUrses in the UK will know tha they have been upgraded to Night NUrse Practionners (NNP's), which by me is fine. they are nurse practionners that work at night, so i can't argue with that. But at my hospital they later becaome Site Nurse Practionners (SNP's). OK i thought well they do mamage the hospital site out of hours so that is fair.

Then they became Clinical Site Nurse Practionners (CSNP's).

see, i thought that was a bit too far... unitl i heard that they would be given deputies called... you've guessesd it Deputy Clinical Site Nurse Practionners!!! (DCSNP's) IF that wasn' t enough that we had siphonned Nurses away to make them Admissions Co-ordinators, Discharge Co-ordinators, Discharge Facilitators and Equipment Resource Nurse Practionners, then my shinning example of hospital bureaucracy would be the time wwhere the antenatal clinic got moved from maternity to near our HDU on the surgical floor. now there was no sign saying which direction it was, only outside the unit door so we had numerous women walking into a restricted area, thinking it was the clinic. obviously this wasn' t their fault.

so in my and my firends genius, we thought 'i know let's make a sign on the computer saying antenatal clinic this way with a big arrow pointing towards the unit'. genius.

so up went the signs and down went to number of lost mothers with child.

THE NEXT DAY, tall wards recieved a memo from the admin department saying that all signs posted must contain the Trust logo and a refernece number given by the admin department. also the signs must be laminated, and have a put up and take down date and if we failed to take down the signs by the take down date then someone would TAKE THEM DOWN FOR YOU!!!!!!!!!! To make things worse the Trust hired someone to go around the whole hosptial and check whether signs had the correct labelling etc.

Now i think that shows how little we need bureaucracy and how much we need a simplification of some things especially administration:) :chuckle

[dianah, ASN]

Are you sure you're located across the pond from me??? Sounds like we work in the same place!! The issue of the signs sounds EXACTLY, EXACTLY like what happened at my facility after a recent move!! We're putting up signs, trying to help the patients get to where they need to go, yet the signs are removed regularly because they aren't regulation . . . yet no "regulation" signs are posted to help . . . vicious circle.

Keep trying!! -- D

[Allison S.]

This sounds familiar. My RN diploma was recalled by the Dean of Nursing, because something was wrong with them. (Don't know what?) It was still valid. Doesn't affect my license. They still haven't replace it as promised. It's been a year -- perhaps I should find something else to put in the frame.

[Dr. Kate, BSN, RN]

If it weren't for enforcing the proper logo rules there are a lot of people who wouldn't know what to do with themselves all day.

Signage is such an important thing. It can make life easier or harder depending on how well it is done. You'd think more attention would be paid to making signs that were really helpful.

[joannep]

I think "Mr Bean" should know about this mad, mad situation, I am sure he could make a lovely skit about it.

Go on, write to him,

Joanne