JeanthePHN

Thank you for the reply about the AAMA organization. That is a helpful reply. I was so upset about this I went to the local hospital and applied for a job so I could work with real nurses and real LPN and CMA. I was totally shocked when the nurse recruiter at xx hospital told me that since I have been an office nurse for 10 years I am unemployable at the hospital. I got so angry and depressed I took a ativan I had at home for my tooth extraction I had last year!! SO this woman walked in my office with no medical training and she gets a job, my supervisor is the former secretary turned nurse and this registered nurse isnt even offered the chance to work at a hospital!

I know the ANA isnt involved with laws but I have contacted the Mass BORN and it is allowed in Mass to have unlicensed and untrained people as medical assistants. On the job training under the physician is allthat is required. I still can not believe that the woman who cuts my hair had to have 1000 hours of training and a license and my new coworker is a former church secretary. Why do I work there? Do you think this is an isolated case? My doctors office is one of thousands that are replacing nurses with untrained people, but these people are still called the nurse. How would you suggest I try to change this?

I sat here reading these posts from the beginning (2001 or so) I am an ofice nurse, an RN, and have had this med. assistant versus nurse problem for several years now. I have been in a private, two doctor office for three years now. He just hired a person off the street, actually a friend of his. She had no prior experience. My other two coworkers are a man who is a graduate of a cma program.The office manager has been the primary fake nurse for years, she is medically untrained and OUR BOSS. She is the primary nurse in the practice and is very good at it BUT It irks me every day that an untrained quote nurse can get to be my boss and an untrained person can get a job in an office giving shots without any formal training. The office manager trained her, I was not even asked. The doctor calls everyone nurse and I resent it. We dont wear name tags. Everyone thinks we are all nurses. The public doesnt care and doesnt even think to ask. We put on our white labs coats and we are nurses.Why does the ANA allow this? If youre a hairdresser you need training and a license. If youre a plumber you need training and a license. IF youre an undertaker you need training and a license. If your a medical assitant it should be the law that you have training and a license.Why is the American Nurses Assoc. allowing this kind of NURSES JOBS to be given away to untrained people? THey fought a long battle to see nursing as a profession not an occupation , and that stupid ongoing debate about adn versus bsn, but they have ignored the fact that an office nurse will be a thing of the past. WHat is next?I can only see it getting worse. My partime second job is in assisted living. Those nurses aides give the medicines to the residents,even the narcotics, the nurse doesnt. THis is what is next. Many States allow medical assistants to give meds out. I bet that in the future the nurses aides in hospitals will be doing the medicines and the IV's and all the tasks the nurses do now. I just so angry I wasted four years of school and still have my loan to repay and the uneducated people get 2 dollars less an hour than I do, but get the respect of being THE NURSE.

well I dont agree. I am 40 and had 2nd generation immigrant parents who never graduated from high school and worked menial jobs all their lives and told me to "be a nurse cause nurses always have work" I was so shy and naive and ignorant when I was 16 17 yrs old I did not know I was chosing a job that wiped butts or body parts, or worked all hours and days of the week. My stupid little world did not know what nurses did as a job and neither did my parents. Of course teenagers and parents and the public dont really know what nurses do today either. When I finally graduated from school, thinking of all the glory and money I could make, I quickly learned I was a slave labor in a hospital as a med/surg nurse and got out. I took a easy, but almost minimum wage clinic job and stayed 10 years. I am one of those 40 something nurses and do regret every going into it. And if I had been born in 1975 or 1980 instead of 1960 I hope my choices would have been more than what my Depression era parents gave me. ------------------

Try the web site for Northeastern University in Boston. Also, when I went there they did not have any co-ops (internships) 70 miles away and I made my own with my local hospital. why cant you do that?

Well, money is not involved. The Health dept does not get money, bill insurances,or anything like that. We have a tax supported budget and all of our services are totally free. And once a person is politically in a city job there is not much that can be done to get them out. We had a nurse who came in high on drugs frequently and it took three years to get her out. How they did that was that was one year she forgot to renew her license and three years went by before they found out she was not a licensed nurse! There are only three nurses that work there and me and my friend, the other nurse, have to work and can not up an quit!Where is a 5o year old nurse with no degree supposed to get a job?Even though we both have worked for the City for 5-10 years, both of us can not even be hired by the School DEpt as school nurses because we do not have BSN's!and the private VNA have turned both of us down because we were not"" current"". This is our reality. Anyway,management sees her sitting down and reading magazines and taking an hour with patients instead of 10 and they ignore it. She is politically connected! I have been there 5 years and what changed is that we have a new boss and I was the one making the decision on what shots to give the patients. She actually took my assessments and just gave the shots.Now, this new boss wants us all cross trained. So now some weeks I give the shots based on her assessments. This started in January. I tried to help her because I knew it was a change in her job description,and the vaccines had changed, even though she had done my job 5 years ago! But it is April and she is still making mistakes. I have told the new boss and all she says is "'she just needs more time"' Can you believe that this nurse actually brings an immunization book that must be 300 pages to the desk and looks up the answers in front of the patient?and it still takes her over half and hour to do one patient!MAnagement sees all this and ignores it. and they see her reading a magazine an ignore her! So most of the frustration that I am having is recent. I gave her a chance and now I am so fed up with her mistakes--she is not learning and agrues with you when you try to correct her--and you people are right. I probably will file a complaint with the Board. Our new mangager of the Big City Health Dept is a 27 year old who just got out of graduate school --with a teaching degree. That's right She is a former school teacher for the elementary schools. She runs the Big City Health CLinic and three RN's. Or shall I say she just collects her $700 a week?The boss before that was a social worker and before her a bricklayer. Thanks for your help.

Thank you all for replying..but documenting wont help here. I work for the Health Dept and all we do is give immunizations once week and give people health information on dieseases. Documenting the fact that this nurse gives children the wrong vaccines probably wont help. I have complained about before and they said was she needs more training. For god's sakes this nurse has been there 3 years longer than I have!! It is just not one issue. She is so mentally slow that comparing her to the three other 50 year old nurses she will take over half and hour to do what can be done in 10 minutes. All the rest of us are pulling her load and we all are sick of it. She has no memory at all and you tell her something about a patient and two days later she yells at you that you never told me!! The other nurse and I have been blamed for years now that "'we don't know how to team build"or we need to improve out interpersonal skills.. Only when we both started talking to each other we realized that management was each blaming us because they can not get rid of her. So, two years, almost three, this goes on. If I quit I am not going to let Mrs.Stupid be the reason.

Well, Sophi, I work for the Department of Health!!Now what do I do?

I work with a nurse who is mentally slow because of some phychiatric illness she has or because of menopause or something. I only work in a clinic so no one is dying here.I know that Managment is protecting her. She is getting worse and as the years have gone by I have stopped interacting with her at all. If I ran to management to copmplain about her, they would ignore me--they have done it several times in the past. Often they blame me that I cant get along with her. She tells patients the wrong information about dieases and she gets away with it. No one is listening and it is driving me crazy. I love my clinic job but working with a mentally ill ?? nurse is making me think of quitting. ------------------