Sunday, December 27, 2009

Who wants nurses away from bedside care?

Anytime there is a piece about nursing or care in our hospitals on the net there is always some shmuck posting his thoughts about what the problem is.

"Nurses don't want to work at the bedside" 

"Nurses want assistants to do all the real work"

"Nurses want degrees so they can be paid more and not get their hands dirty" 

People who say these things are Shmucks.

I even had one jerk telling me that the nurses themselves were behind the hospitals drive to hire care assistants instead of nurses because "nurses don't want to get their hands dirty".   Ha ha ha.  As if nurses could dictate to the hospital who they hire.

Nurses were forced away from the bedside.  They did not leave the bedside because they hate patient care.
I wrote another letter to a manager.  I tried to explain that we have more patients than we can handle etc etc etc.  That more care assistants than nurses  on the team means death and is not at all cost effective.

I actually got a response.  But all it does is show that he doesn't have a clue. Nor did he really read my letter.

"Nurses can either take a three year diploma or a four year degree course although there are moves to make all nurses take a degree, and I imagine part of the push behind that is to increase the starting salary. It will also probably mean more assistants on the ward, as the move to make nursing into a more clinical role will mean that the more hands on tasks will devolve to HCAs. This is a shift that has been happening for many years (alongside moving tasks from doctors to nurses) as it reduces costs at the same time as encouraging specialisation."


Fuckhead thinks that "dumbing down" reduces costs!  It doesn't. He wants me to "specialise" and play doctor while the HCA's screw up my patients' nursing care.  As a matter of fact I am sick and tired of having to play doctor and order diagnostic tests etc because it is taking us 10 hours to get a doctor to see our patients in hospital because there are so few doctors.  Example: If the nurses do not order the INR tests for warfarin control then they won't get done for a week. 

I have never seen anyone miss a point so massively.

It was NOT the nurses who did this people.  It's not about the nurses  "not wanting to get their hands dirty".

Edit 28/12.
Clueless management types have destroyed the level of care in our hospitals and driven nurses away.  I agree with the commentator who said that nurses need to be indpendent contractors...was it Suzanne Gordon who first said this?.  Nurses should be independent contractors and move away from this government run crap. It's worse than corporate run crap really.  Let's not be their scapegoats any longer. Let's no longer allow ourselves to be put in situations where we cannot do our jobs.

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