This was sent to me by a nurse in Florida,this ran in the opinions section of the Palm Beach Post, I can not authenticate the article at the post (it costs to search the archives) but based on the posts going on over here I wanted to share this.
Opinion Saturday, May 5
Letter: Nurses hold own destiny in their hard-working handsThe Palm Beach Post
Saturday, May 5, 2001
In response to Fran Hathaway's April 29 column "What do nurses want? Read on": Nurses are their own worst enemy when it comes to their profession. Just look at what the five nurses said when interviewed: They asked to remain anonymous. No positive changes in the labor movement ever happened because employees wanted to remain anonymous, but in nursing, this is the prevailing view. When it comes to improving their own working conditions, they rely on someone else to do it. The perception that a caring hospital administrator will come to their rescue (like in a fairy tale) is the perception of most nurses in the field. Asking an administrator to treat nurses like professionals and improve their working conditions would be the equivalent of asking Hannibal Lecter to skip a meal; it just isn't going to happen. In simple economic terms, nurses are overhead -- plain and simple. If administrators can "get the job done" with less overhead, they get a bigger bonus. They are not concerned about patient care; their only interest is the bottom line, that's their job. The nurse is concerned about being a patient advocate, and the administrator's only concern is maximizing profits. When the two agendas collide, the outcome is clear: Nurses quit, and patients die. If nurses truly want to be patient advocates, they will organize themselves. Nursing is a "blue-collar" profession. Nurses are fighting over the same issues that men fought and died for in the labor movement of the early 1900s: improved working conditions, wages, hours, job safety, benefits). Nurses have only to look at history to solve these problems. The choice is theirs; they now have the perfect opportunity to take control of the profession. But do they have the courage to fight for what they believe in?
