Fancy Meeting You Here Adolph

[SpankedInPittsburgh, DNP, RN]

Hello All:

Today was my first day of DUI safe driving class here in Pennsylvania. The class itself was uneventful but the person I sat next to was my living embodiment of Hitler. Well not quite. Here in the Greater Pittsburgh are there are two major cogs in the rehabilitation industry that PNAP sends just about all the nurses to. I sat across from the Drug and Alcohol admissions counselor from the major provider that PNAP choose not to send me to (they were full) as she too for all her knowledge of the evils of alcohol got a DUI.

As you may imagine me and Ms. Hitler had a conversation about the Nurse Monitoring Program in our state. She was actually very open and polite and we wound up having lunch together. Anyway, I asked her opinion of our program and she stated that she thought it was far too all encompassing and intrusive. She said that treatment cannot effectively be combined with punishment and that is what these programs do. In her opinion after treatment it is important to get the person back to work as soon as possible and that (in effect) taking a person's ability to make a living away from them is about the worst thing you could do to effectuate an actual recovery process.

I then brought up my "conspiracy theory" about the ties between the rehab industry and the BONs / monitoring programs. She told me I was crazy and that in many cases people wait weeks for either an inpatient bed or a slot in outpatient. She stated that they are instructed in PNAP cases to essentially send the nurse to as much treatment as humanly possible at the behest of the monitoring program. I told her my particular story of having a one-time DUI at the age of 55 and being sent to 4 months of inpatient then outpatient rehab and asked what treatment level would be advised to a non-nurse. She stated in my case appropriate treatment would have been 1/2 day for 2-3 weeks and that I was lucky my insurance carrier paid for this (they in fact cut off the money or I might still be there). Essentially she stated that its not the rehab industry wielding all this havoc to nurses but nurses themselves demanding this course of treatment.

I don't know what to think of all this. I just thought I'd share it with my fellow denizens of rehab land. I hope you are all having a better weekend then I'm looking at watching videos of the evils of drinking and driving.

Be well all!!!

[catsmeow1972, BSN, RN]

That last line tells me that it's the monitoring program (our fellow nurses) demanding all this unnecessary treatment and unnecessary expense and unnecessary unemployment. In other words we seem to relish torturing our own. Somehow that isn't too shocking. We've long said this is about power and control by people who've probably never had it.

I don't know that there is a conspiracy theory between the BONs and the programs. I think the BONs just sort of turf us to the programs and forget about us. Said programs then run rampant with all kinds of BS, including tapping into the "rehab industrial complex" money spigot.

I must say, I'm not sure if I find it funny or sad that the person you were in a DUI class with such a person.