A nurse told me that she wore a pedometer and discovered that she had to walk eight miles every day. At three miles an hour, that would come to 2.67 hours out of every eight that she works.
Henry Ford said that pedestrianism is not a highly paying line of work, so he designed the Henry and Clara Ford Hospital to minimize the walking that nurses have to do. In the case shown above, the nurse is effectively paid for 5.33 hours of every eight that she works. If this could be corrected, we would not have a nursing shortage because nursing salaries could be increased 40 percent or more without higher costs for patients or insurers.
Can anyone provide some information on how much walking he or she has to do every day?
When I was training on days it was still about 12 miles.
I thought I would gain work at my first job, but keeping my diet in check and I've actually lost a few pounds.
I'm not complaining, at first my feet hurt but then I got some great Nikes that are similar to z coils. Ugliest shoes ever, but no more feet/back or leg pain!
With my Zcoils...It hasn't mattered anymore... If I walk all day or sit... Im doing fine! And Im out lasting all the youngNs
Okay, my MIL's sister has a pair and they're the dorkies things on earth, but she swears by them too. What is it about them that makes them so great? Do they help your back or your legs more, do you think? 'Cause I'll get them if they're really all that, screw fashion.
Retired now: I try for 2 miles a day on the town walking path. It's been raining a lot so for the past week it has been more like 1.25 across our wooded lot.
Addendum: When I did work the hospital had half, and mile markers in the hallways. It was basically a rectangular building with halls on each side and the stations, elevators and mechanicals down the center. From the parking garage to the time clock was 1/2 mile. from the elevator to the end of one hall and around to the elevator again was 1/2 mile. We had pods of 10 patients, rooms in numerical order. It really cut down on the walking. Thats one of the few things I fondly remember of the he** hole.
Specializes in Community Health, Med-Surg, Home Health.
I did the same thing a few years back when I was a Patient Care Associate...got a pedometer for my walking regimene and decided to use it at work. At that time, I averaged about 8 miles a day. As a nurse, I am quite sure that the number has risen!
I work in peri-op and walk 10-12 miles in a 12 hr day.
This is all excellent information, and I can use it in some articles I am writing about GENUINE health care reform. It confirms that the story I heard from a nurse a couple of weeks ago is not an isolated situation, and that the way nurses' jobs are designed includes enormous waste.
Henry Ford wrote more than 80 years ago that people cannot be paid to walk. In your case, assuming that you can walk 3 miles an hour inside a hospital, you spend 3.3 to 4 hours per shift walking. You can be paid only to take care of patients, which means you are actually paid for fewer than 9 of the 12 hours you work. To put this another way, fewer than 9 hours of genuine pay are spread over 12 hours of work, like butter being spread too thinly on bread. (I don't eat butter because of the fat, but it shows the idea.)
In the old smaller ER, my pedometer showed 5-8 miles a night. In the new big one, ouch! 15 times around the new ER is one mile.
As for nonproductive time spent walking, doesn't fly. I am carrying meds to them, pushing them to the floor, taking people to Xray (if needs to be on a monitor and have nurse with them), bringing people to rooms (lets me get in my intial general survey and assess gaits) etc.
"Carrying" (transportation) is actually defined as a non-value-adding activity (waste) in lean manufacturing, e.g. if parts have to be moved from one part of the factory to another. The parts must obviously be moved to the work station, and the medications must obviously get to the patient, but the manner in which this is done defines the efficiency of the process. The idea of robotic carts to deliver medications from the pharmacy to the nurse's station came to mind immediately, and the FIRST item from a Google search on "robotic carts" yielded http://www.compukiss.com/articles/robotic-helpers-are-here-now.html " If you have been to the hospital lately, you might have seen robotic carts delivering medications and equipment."
This is still transportation (non-value-adding activity), but I'm pretty sure the robot's time, in terms of capital investment and electricity, is far less valuable than that of a nurse or other human worker.
If, however, value-adding work can be done while walking, such as assessing gaits, this is value-adding time and not waste.
I am thinking more in terms, though, of nurses having to walk to and from patient rooms to supply areas, pharmacies, data entry stations, and so on. One objection that doctors have to computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems is that they would have to walk to a computer to write a prescription as opposed to writing it on a pad. This is a valid objection because walking to and from the computer is waste. If the doctor has some kind of handheld device, it eliminates the need to walk. The same goes for entry of patient data (e.g. blood pressure and so on) by nurses; if you have to walk to a room to enter this information, it's wasted time. Here is an interesting question; do patient rooms have computer terminals or something similar into which nurses can enter this information, or are portable handheld devices available?
Henry Ford wrote more than 80 years ago that people cannot be paid to walk. In your case, assuming that you can walk 3 miles an hour inside a hospital, you spend 3.3 to 4 hours per shift walking. You can be paid only to take care of patients, which means you are actually paid for fewer than 9 of the 12 hours you work. To put this another way, fewer than 9 hours of genuine pay are spread over 12 hours of work,
Who are you? Who are you writing for? What is your idea of GENUINE Health reform?
Who are you? Who are you writing for? What is your idea of GENUINE Health reform?
I am an industrial quality professional, and I am currently involved in a panel on health care reform. (I previously was part of Governor Rendell's health care reform panel, where he brought in doctors, business professionals, and so on to comment on health care reform efforts in Pennsylvania.)
I have written several trade journal articles on the need to implement quality management systems (like ISO 9001:2000) in health care systems. A recent one in Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare says that hospitals should fix the root causes of mistakes--four out of five of which are the responsibility of the system in which health care workers must work, as opposed to negligence or carelessness--instead of disciplining nurses. The latter approach discourages nurses from reporting mistakes or even near-misses, which means the underlying problems never get corrected and the same mistakes can happen again.
In a Japanese-run hospital, a nurse would immediately report that she had, for example, almost given somebody the wrong medication. The system in which she worked would be changed to make such an error impossible in the future. Not only would she not be disciplined, she might even be praised or rewarded for bringing the potential problem to management's attention. Japanese workers do this all the time. Shigeo Shingo said that any job that requires "worker vigilence" (e.g. "being careful") to prevent mistakes is not properly designed.
30 to 60 cents of every health care dollar is wasted on activities that do not create any benefit for patients. This includes things that hurt patients, like hospital-acquired infections. If this cost of poor quality could be reduced or eliminated, patients would have better outcomes and lower costs, while nurses and physicians could be paid more. The government's current health care "reform" plans do not even begin to address the costs of poor quality and inefficiencies in health care.
Of course, Henry Ford would reduce walking so we could be more "productive", -use fewer nurses to take care of more patients.
The walk time is time spent thinking and planning my next moves, it is not wasted.
Ford would indeed have done this so fewer nurses could care for more patients--but without reducing quality by reducing the time that the nurses could spend with the patients. Suppose, for example, that proper care for a group of patients requires 30 minutes per patient per shift. A nurse who must walk for 2 hours out of every shift can care for 12 patients. If the nurse must walk only 30 minutes, he or she can care for 15 patients--and be paid 25 percent more. If the walking time can be put to productive use, however, this does not really apply.
Ford never objected to paying good money for a good job, but he did not consider it fair to his customers or workers to hire, for example, ten people to do the work of five (because the job design wasted half of the worker's time). On the surface, this looks like jobs for five more people, but the bottom line is that five workers' pay must then be divided among ten people.
oregonchinamom
80 Posts
I work in peri-op and walk 10-12 miles in a 12 hr day.