NO MORE LPNS?

realnursealso/LPN, LPN · Mar 25, 2001

mlvogt, In the area I live in many facility's have tried to do away with LPN's and replace them with NA's. It was an exercise in futility and disaster. First of all their are not enough RN's as everyone already knows. So when they went about the task of hiring enough RN's to facilitate sufficent staffing levels, it never happened. Sooner or later the powers that be in a hospital realized how unsucessful their cost cutting attempts were. The small local hospital in the little city I live by tried to do away with the LPN's and their intention was to replace them with tech's or whatever the new name is. Some of the LPN's they were going to replace had between 15-25 yrs. of experience in ICU or the ER. The whole community was up in arms, the docs threatened to move their patients to another hospital, the public demonstrated with the LPN's in front of the hospital, and many of the hospital board were bombarded at home with phone calls. End result was the hospital backed down, the DON(whose idea it was) left, or lost her job...not sure which and the administrator held on barely by the skin of his teeth to his job. . The community was outraged and I'm sure it won't happen again anytime soon. By the way when this was going to happen they never said how they were going to train these people to take over. They had a target date but no real plan of implementation. You can't replace highly trained and experienced professionals with people from off the streets. So this is what happened here...hope it doesn't happen where you are.

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Q. · Mar 25, 2001

We had one or two LPNs at my job, but we eliminated them as it didn't seem like we were able to use them. I work in Labor and Delivery and unfortunately, a LPN couldn't pick up a labor patient and so it wasn't any help to us (or to her) We do have CNA's in post-partum only, however a LPN might be more helpful there.

ktwlpn, LPN · Mar 27, 2001

Originally posted by mlvogt:
The hospital I work at is going through a "redesign process" The purpose is to come out in the black finacially ( Im sure they were never in the red) They have cut many of our support services including the admit team. They even wanted to get rid of the IV therapy dept.( that didn't go over well) anyways the question and comment I have is the hospital wants to eliminate the lpn positions. (Bad idea in my mind) well any ways they want to replace them with cna's. Has anybody else worked in RN/CNA teams and how do they work.

I was laid off last year from my small community hospital-they had the same idea...and now are rehiring LPN's.No one really went to bat for us-the docs griped a bit and the local papers carried a few articles but that was about it.They had started training n.a's to do alot of our tasks(fingersticks,e.k.g's) but did not have a full complement trained.Consequently when the census goes up the R.N.'s are typically taking as many as 13 pts with an n.a.I am now at a local LTC-the last 4 patients I have sent out to that hospital now have instructions on their charts specifying that they be transferred anywhere else...they return to us in deplorable condition.Ancillary staff has been cut to the bone.Patient satisfaction continues to suffer and according to my friends that are still there things are dangerous.Hang on until the pendulum swings back-just make sure you have good malpractice insurance.