Dallas nurses fired after voicing concern for their ICU patients

:cry:

the profession. The most frequent complaint is the brutal working conditions imposed by a for profit medical system.

One of the worst feelings in the world is the one of never knowing when something will happen at work due to short staffing and exhausted staff on mandatory overtime that will cost a nurse the license s/he worked so hard to get.

Nurses are the canaries in the coal mine, folks. The fact that 50% of them are no longer there should tell people something, but I guess greed yells louder.

Left in February after almost 30 years...it's brutal out there for those in the trenches. Favorable patient outcomes are directly related to good nursing care at the bedside. Without it, our patients are effed. If this continues much longer, our entire healthcare system is in jeopardy, yet the nursing shortage is never mentioned when talking about "the healthcare crisis". Those running for office are clueless.

because the halls kept getting longer, the patients kept getting fatter (300 lb. plus), the staffing kept getting shorter, and my back kept rebelling from all of it.

I will always miss it but I can't think of anything that would make me desperate enough to go back.

with more visas to bring in lower paid, often under-qualified nurses from abroad.

but they have trouble with the language and need training to use the technology.

The shortage is usually addressed by "new staffing guidelines" issued every six months saying, "Bend over, hon, nobody who left will be replaced and their jobs are now yours."

Thats one of the reasons I left Health Care and wet back to shipbuilding. Administrator's only concern is the bottom line. They do and say whatever "Corporate", tells them to. At any cost.
Understaffing is so bad out here in CA. Its supposed to be a 6-1 ratio by law but I've worked stations where its 20-1. The patients suffer greatly due to the understaffing and the fatigue factor of nurses who routinely have to work 4+ 16 hour shifts in a row to make the quota.
I've seen good nurses get canned, quite often dismissing them on trumped-up charges, for expressing their concern for the welfare of their patients.

Health"care"?

I though the nurses' union had made some improvements....?

Its the same way it was when I left in 12/05. My best friend is an RN who is bullied into working multiple/consecutive 16 hr shifts. Everyone is tired and slower.
I've see patients DIE from this.
I've seen nurses DIE from this.
Healthcare in the US is a racket.

when you can be represented by a union and *still* have this happen.

Unless you work at big hospitals you wont find the union.

There is an organ in my body that must be "America" (the one I grew up believing in), and this story makes it ache.

staffing to maintain the ICU standard of one RN/two-patient ratio, but if someone called in and we couldn't get a float, you might get stuck with three pretty damn sick people. I don't miss that job. What I love about this story is the hospital saying, "Oh, you don't think we have enough nurses? Well, guess what--we have even less now--you're fired!" Boy, that's helpful.

:wtf:

:grr:

I work for a large "Christian" hospital system.My administration chronically understaffed me,despite my vocal-and written-objections.Word gets out if you are a problem nurse.Most of the nurses I worked with were from the Phillipines,made less money than I did,and were afraid to speak out,lest they be deported.As far as I know,there are NO union hospitals in Texas.They tried to bring the union in about 15 years ago,and many nurses were fired,intimidated for participating.

the repubs are working on ending the shortage by bringing in as many low wage foreign nurses as possible.

of course those dang dems would rather offer more nursing schools for AMERICANS, but hey this is a global economy, right?

At the age of forty two, after a career as a hospice nurse.

He got tired of doing basically the same job as a doctor, not getting any respect and being abused by superiors constantly.

IMO, he will make a great doctor. He is going to make his practice in a small town and plans on home visits for the severely housebound.

Very few holistic physicians in my area...I know ONE who makes housecalls.

That's what got him into med school--the head of admissions told him that, if he could handle doing that job for six years (started in high school), then he could handle med school and residency. That's why Hubby's nice to the nurses and spends the time he needs to on his patients. I told him that, if I ever find out he was mean to a nurse or anything like that (and I have ways of finding out), he'd pay for it at home, too.

Why do they always cut nursing staffing levels? They think it's cheaper to pay more in malpractice insurance and lawyer fees, and that's just sick.

Words to live by at the outfit I retired from.

I quit hospital nursing because it was just too damned exhausting - physically, emotionally and mentally. Another problem this country faces is that the population of nurses is aging rapidly. Bright young women aren't as attracted to it as they were in my salad days, when it was one of the few educated professions that welcomed them. It's also getting harder to qualify as a nurse: most RNs now are required to have Bachelor's Degrees, which are getting more and more expensive every year. College educations were relatively cheap when I got mine, and there were lots of scholarships available for nurses.

Firing good nurses is insane. Replacing them with less skilled staff is putting patients in danger: horror stories abound whenever nurses let our hair down and share our "war stories".

http://www.seiu.org/health/nurses/

Beware management thuggery and the hiring of professional union busters to try to prevent unionization. Mesquite, Texas, is probably a worst-case scenario.

The whole system is sick, sick, sick. :-(

Hekate

In order to attract (and retain) the best qualified applicants, magnet hospitals for nursing are a decent start. They require certain staff ratios depending on the level of patient acuity as well as certain standards. Unfortunately, hospitals to achieve this are few and far between.