Beauty Salon VS. General Medical/Surgical Ward

Okay guys check this out.

I was talking to my little sister yesterday. She is a hairdresser in the States. She works from 0900 to 1500 daily and makes WAY more money than I do because of the tips she gets. We had a conversation the other day.


Nurse Anne: So how many chairs do you have at your hair salon?

Little Sister: uuuuum like 10 chairs.

Anne: How many staff do you have on a normal day?

Little Sister: Um... like.... never any less than 4 or 5. Um like we take one hour lunches. And if customers don't like waiting it's tough titties. Um like and oh yeah we sit in the back and like smoke and shit and make them wait longer if they complain.

They can leave if they don't like it like okay? Yesterday Kiki and Emilio did my hair and my nails because it was like a totally slow day. We closed down the shop for an hour or 5 and had a little party. Like I think I am going blonde at work tomorrow. Emilio will fix it for me.


Jesus Christ where is their manager and/or owner?

But I digress...


Okay so let's go back and analyze this. They have 10 chairs. The maximum number of people being seen to at once is 10. They may also have customers waiting in the lounge. No harm comes to them as a result of waiting for awhile. They have 10 chairs and 4 to 5 staff.

My 35 bed (now 39 beds because the treatment rooms and day rooms are now patient rooms) ward considers itself lucky if we have 4 staff. We get on our knees thanking Jesus if at least 2 of those staff members are actual nurses. Our patients are acute, highly dependent,and many have dementia. They can die or have extremely bad complications because of one little fuck up or missed bit of information. I had 10 of them who needed to go off the ward for essential diagnostic tests the other day. At the same time. Why does god hate me?

All of them needed escorts because they were either on 02, they had dementia and would wander, fall and get lost if left alone in x-ray, or they were on drips that could not come down. All that stuff requires an escort from the ward staff to go with the Porter and stay with the patient.

We had 3 staff on duty. 10 patients needed to be off the ward with an escort (Nurse or HCA). No escort means no test basically. Radiology has a shit fit if they are asked to come to the ward to do a chest x-ray on someone who is too poorly to go down there and there are no escorts. The other departments constantly have shit fits because they want the nurses to revolve everything around their particular diagnositc department. Endoscopy is the worst for this by the way. Fuckers. Just kidding. ;)



Does anyone else think that any of this is completely sick?


We have been harassing the managers and matrons for months trying to get them to meet with us. The only response we have got from the powers that be recently went something like this "You are well staffed as far as we are concerned. Deal with it and cope".