Is it just me?

[mindlor]

Or is nursing one of a handful of professions where it seems that managements job is to work against us at every turn and plot and plan to make our lives as miserable as possible?

They want good survey scores, then they staff with skeleton crews. The pull newbies from orientation way too soon. They make us go to meetings and talk about survey results and how every negative metric is somehow the fault of the nurses.

Then they are shocked and appalled when employees leave...to the point of being offended....

Its really perplexing to me.....

[cardiacfreak, ADN]

We were told that pts that responded with "good" on their care questions didn't count; it only counted if they said "excellent". And as we all remember from statistics, most people don't like to answer with extremes, so they tend to choose the 2nd highest answer, even if they were satisfied with the care.

So our scores are tied into annual individual evaluations; if the floor as whole doesn't get a high enough aggregate score, your individual eval score is decreased by 10%. "Good" care doesn't count, only "excellent". Which just leads us back to the old baseball saying: there are lies, d*** lies, and statistics.

So true and that is why at our hospital everything is scripted using the term "excellent" as in "This is George, he is going to be your RN for the night and will be taking excellent care of you." It seems like a bunch of BS but our scores have improved.

It's sad to see what nursing has become in the last 20 years but we have to roll with the punches I guess

[TajoRN]

No, it's not just you. No one cares about the nurses; they only care about money, as most corporations do.

[canigraduate]

In regards to the surveys, I finally started telling patients that only "excellent" scores count. I also made sure that all of the newbies heard my "only excellent counts, so if you can't say we gave you excellent service, let the charge nurse know on your way out" spiel.

For some reason, our scores started going up...

[Daliadreamer]

My dad and I had a discussion about this the other day....he said that he never fills out surveys that are "excellent" because he feels like that leaves them with no room to improve. My response to that was " you probably got someone fired for those responses". (I know I'm exaggerating but you get the idea.)

[microkate]

I worked for Kaplan test prep for 7 years, and our student surveys decided our "Excellence" rating. Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, but only excellent counted. Meanwhile, my husband never gives top scores on any survey because that means there's nor room for improvement. He was appalled when I explained that in most customer-driven environments excellent = A, anything else =F.