- Joined
- Feb 24, 2006
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I would like to tell you all about an email broadcasted to everyone in the hospital today.
It is an email advertising a talk being given next month about the nursing shortage. As in, shortage of bedside, patient-care RNs. Which is a real and serious thing as anyone in health care can tell you.
The talk is being given by a "nurse specialist" with 13 letters after her name. Some of the abbreviations, I cannot even identify: "RN, MHS, BC, CNA, OCN." What is an MHS? What is OCN? Who invented these acronyms? Do these involve any benefit to the patients?
So here's an idea why there is a nursing shortage.
There is a shortage of bedside nurses because nurses are encouraged not to be at the bedside.
If you are at a place with a strong nursing school, you know what I mean. Nurses have an expectation for finding a white-coat specialty. Real, bedside nurses are looked down upon by the specialists, even though the bedside nurses are the ones who are actually beneficial to patients. Even the speaker at this event described in the email gave up real nursing to become yet another useless mouth, and then wonders why there is a shortage of bedside nurses.
In this economy, and with health care in this kind of crisis... why exactly do we insist on continuing what amounts to welfare for these people? The nurse clinical coordinators. The nurse case managers. The nurse document specialists. Nurses who wouldn't know a foley from an IV and have no interest in learning the difference anyway. Nurses who don't really do anything at all.
I don't mean NPs... while they have their issues, at least they actually see patients. No, I mean the above-mentioned crowd in their white coats who serve no useful purpose at all.
There is no use for the white-coat-nurse crowd. None. Zero. They could all be fired tomorrow and the lives of the real nurses and doctors would only barely be affected. They suck up god-knows-how-much money from payroll... even in this economy... and they do not contribute anything useful. I have yet to meet a doc who actually reads the chart notes from this lot. I have yet to see even a single outpatient or inpatient decision affected in the slightest by what one of these useless mouths charted. So why exactly are we paying them?
Here's an idea. A simple one that will save the battered, underperforming American healthcare system countless dollars and help patients to boot. I won't even charge a fee for someone else to use it. Go ahead, it's in the public domain!
1. Fire all the useless-mouth nurse specialists. Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
2. Offer to give them jobs as real bedside nurses, at the same pay they were getting before.
3. In fact, bump up the pay of all competent bedside RNs to what "nurse case managers" (whatever the heck that is) are getting right now.
There ya go. Return respect, prestige and compensation to actual nursing, and boot people who refuse to take care of patients out of the patient-care system.
The problems and solutions are so obvious... and yet people refuse to do anything about it.
It is an email advertising a talk being given next month about the nursing shortage. As in, shortage of bedside, patient-care RNs. Which is a real and serious thing as anyone in health care can tell you.
The talk is being given by a "nurse specialist" with 13 letters after her name. Some of the abbreviations, I cannot even identify: "RN, MHS, BC, CNA, OCN." What is an MHS? What is OCN? Who invented these acronyms? Do these involve any benefit to the patients?
So here's an idea why there is a nursing shortage.
There is a shortage of bedside nurses because nurses are encouraged not to be at the bedside.
If you are at a place with a strong nursing school, you know what I mean. Nurses have an expectation for finding a white-coat specialty. Real, bedside nurses are looked down upon by the specialists, even though the bedside nurses are the ones who are actually beneficial to patients. Even the speaker at this event described in the email gave up real nursing to become yet another useless mouth, and then wonders why there is a shortage of bedside nurses.
In this economy, and with health care in this kind of crisis... why exactly do we insist on continuing what amounts to welfare for these people? The nurse clinical coordinators. The nurse case managers. The nurse document specialists. Nurses who wouldn't know a foley from an IV and have no interest in learning the difference anyway. Nurses who don't really do anything at all.
I don't mean NPs... while they have their issues, at least they actually see patients. No, I mean the above-mentioned crowd in their white coats who serve no useful purpose at all.
There is no use for the white-coat-nurse crowd. None. Zero. They could all be fired tomorrow and the lives of the real nurses and doctors would only barely be affected. They suck up god-knows-how-much money from payroll... even in this economy... and they do not contribute anything useful. I have yet to meet a doc who actually reads the chart notes from this lot. I have yet to see even a single outpatient or inpatient decision affected in the slightest by what one of these useless mouths charted. So why exactly are we paying them?
Here's an idea. A simple one that will save the battered, underperforming American healthcare system countless dollars and help patients to boot. I won't even charge a fee for someone else to use it. Go ahead, it's in the public domain!
1. Fire all the useless-mouth nurse specialists. Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
2. Offer to give them jobs as real bedside nurses, at the same pay they were getting before.
3. In fact, bump up the pay of all competent bedside RNs to what "nurse case managers" (whatever the heck that is) are getting right now.
There ya go. Return respect, prestige and compensation to actual nursing, and boot people who refuse to take care of patients out of the patient-care system.
The problems and solutions are so obvious... and yet people refuse to do anything about it.
