I was told just fresh out of nursing school that I would need to learn to be flexible, and that the healthcare world was going to change. Now, 35 years later, it has, and yet it hasn’t. The media is so full of talk about the Affordable Care Act, Congress, and the evils of insurance that one wonders what the “change” really is. But in nursing, and in the hospital setting, changes are big and not necessarily in the right direction. We talk about productivity instead of what we can REALLY do for our patients. Administration makes changes based on budgets and bottom line profit numbers, and yearly at the fiscal changeover we are threatened with job cuts and mergers because “we just aren’t making any money anymore.”
So the actual number of beds are cut that we can place patients in. And yet the patients STILL come, and they are sick . REALLY sick. But we are still hearing “do more with less”. Patients and their families are angry when they get here because it has taken so long to get care–because they have been telling caregivers they don’t feel well, they feel they were not listened to. And it still falls back on the staff, whose hands are tied.
“Do more with less”…right.
Tell that to the patient who just wants to feel like someone cares, and who wants to get well.
Labyrinth, Ideas, and Wanderings 