printernurse

A recent pole of Canadian citizens found that 65 percent of them were happy with their health care. US health insurance have spent a lot of money trying to make Americans believe that things are bad in Canada. Most Canadian's are completely fearful of a US style health care system. I know this because my in-laws are Canadian. I go to Canada several times a year and have had many conversations with them and their friends on this subject. Of course the Canadian health care system has problems. But I can state this unequivocally most Canadian's think that our system is by far the worse system. One very big myth is that Canadian system is a socialized medicine. It is in fact administered by a private insurance company. Something like one third of the cost of our system is the huge expense that hospitals dedicate to dealing with the administrative paper work that is caused by having to deal with a lot of insurance companies. That is an expense that Canadian's do not have. Canadian's make pharmaceutical companies submit bulk bids for medicine and because of this pay far less than we do. The most recent medicaid/medicare bill passed by congress had a provision put in by the pharmaceutical industry to prohibit bulk bids. Interestingly the VA is able to submit bulk bids and because of this has the lowest cost for medicine. The number one reason for bankruptcy in this country is because of medical bills.

What about all the millions of americans who have jobs that pay substandard wages? Many two wage earner families where both husband and wife earn 11 or 12 bucks an hour have no health insurance or substandard insurance with premiums that are unaffordable for them. In Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic uses private companies to do house keeping, deliver food to patients, work in the kitchen etc. They have no health insurance. Their workers are the tenth highest users of Medicaid in the state. Wal Mart is number one. No surprise there. By the way the Cleveland Clinic is rated as the number one Heart Surgery hospital in the US by U.S.News&WorldReport http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/best-hospitals/rankings/specihqcard.htm. They have a luxury hotel where most of the oil Sheiks from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates come to have their health care. They are famous for renting whole floors and bringing hundreds of servants and family with them. Most of the workers in This hotel have no health insurance. What about all the workers at Wal Mart who cannot afford their insurance? And what about all those so called "illegal aliens"? I agree that there is a real problem with immigration in this country. It is said that american workers wont pick crops in this country because the work is too hard and the wages are too low. Who could blame them when even McDonald’s pays more and the work is not nearly as hard or dangerous. Imagine what your apples would cost if workers were paid 11 bucks an hour with health care benefits? (Personally I think that should be the minimum for any job.) How much would your apples cost then? Eight bucks a pound? Maybe that's what they should cost. It is said by some that this country has the best health care in the world. Best for whom? Nurses on med/surg floors at the Cleveland Clinic sometimes have 8 pts. As nurses we know that this is a dangerous ratio, but that it is unfortunately very common. Some people may think that there is no "impending doom in the health care system". I would agree in that the system is already doomed. Health care in this country has been unaffordable for many employers for a long time. Premiums have been high for a long time and keep getting higher. The percentage of the expense that workers have to pay keeps getting higher. Health care costs now count for what I thought I heard was something like 15 percent of GDP. (Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on the exact percentage.) A mind boggling amount of money. It is the biggest reason why real wages have not gone up very much in the last 20 years. Believing that there is no health care crisis in this country is almost as bad as believing that we don't have a problem in Iraq.

I believe that my average was in the low 60s. A had a high of 80% and a low of 50%. Buy passed the test in 79 questions. When I was done with the test I did not feel very confident. This was the case on almost every test I took in nursing. Even the Hesi on which I scored 945 on the first test and 1012 on the exit Hesi, I was clueless untill I received my score. I was just hoping for the 850 that we needed to pass. I went through about half of the Saunders book, none of the cd, and did about 2000 online Kaplan questions. Still with 2 years of nursing school, many practice NCLEX questions, Hesi, I felt like a lot of the NCLEX was completely new. I received about 10 pharm questions, but no math. I also received aprox. 8 to 10 of the new style questions. What I am saying is that I was in the low 60s on Kaplan and still passed.

My take is that hospitals are more willing to train younger nurses as they are considered a better investment. I don't necessarily agree with this. My haunch is that they believe that if they train a younger nurse that that nurse will be with them for a lot longer. Again not necessarily true. Hospitals also pay attention to GPA and past work record. I have a friend who just graduated. She is 62 years old with a GPA of 2.1. She was also dismissed form her last job for reasons that were not entirely her fault. She has applied to many places and only receive a couple of interviews. I applies to 4 places and got interviews on 2 floors at each place. Neither place hired me. I had a 3.1 GPA in nursing classes and a 3.8 in every in all other classes. I was a little bit bumed out as part of the reason I went into nursing was because of the supposed easy of getting a job. I was especially surprised that I did not get a job one of the hospitals as it has a large spanish speaking population with few nurses who speak spanish. The next 2 places that I applied I was offered jobs almost on the spot. I don't kwow if it was age discrimination at the first 2 places or perhaps they had too many new grads. I do know that both still have many want ads posted. My guess is that every new grad will get a job, but that they will have to be willing to take less desirable positions and shifts, i.e. a med/surge floor 3:00 PM till 11:30 PM to start out.

I'm a new nurse, but I've found that heart sounds are hard to find on some "big" people. Some pts have a lot of muscle, bone, and fat and you can not get heart sounds in every spot.

Get used to nursing school. We were given reading and/or project assingments before every semester. We were always told that it was optional, but most of us tried to do at least part of the work. Nursing school is a matter of survival. There is a belief among teachers that if they make things really hard they will weed out people who wont pass the NCLEX. They of course will denign this. Most of us worked full time and were always trying to get whatever we could done whenever we could. This unfortunately meant breaks before semesters.