I'm an "old" RN. Not old in age years, but old in work years as I started young.
Recently I was displaced out of my specialty due to a layoff, and find myself back on the floor in a medical/oncology role.
I'm not sure I will survive! My work focus for many years has been... well, focused on a specific set of clinical interventions relative to my role, and I was damn good at it.
Even ICU was easier than this. Heck, ER was easier than this.
The coordinating of ever-expanding multidisciplinary teams, specialists, hospitalists, technology, the push to get the patient out the door from the moment they're admitted, and the complexity of today's med/surg patients is astounding.
What blows my mind is how the process of delivering the actual care has changed. What once were routine tasks, are encumbered and bogged down by a system of dictatorial, connect-the-dot technologies and computer processes. What used to take one minute to do, now takes five even though the procedure or intervention itself remains the same or nearly the same as it did twelve years ago.
And somewhere in this mess, there's an actual patient.
