Quote:
Originally Posted by jmg
YES and it's one of the reasons my wife retired early. It's not necessarily the nurses' fault, it's the administration's understaffing to save money. Hospital administrations would rather patient care suffer then call in more nurses. And even when they do, it's a crap shoot if anyone is available. It's reactionary instead of preventative. The nurses and the patient suffer because administration are cheap bastards. Here's the worst part: When the nurse to patient ratio is off, the neglect is exponential. Nurses are expected to chart chart chart, which isn't a big deal except now you have more patients than normal to chart for, AND they get reprimanded for staying late and getting paid OT for charting. So, shift hours that should be dedicated to patient care, are now used for charting. The logical solution is to overlap nurse shifts to account for charting and allow for uninterrupted patient care, but that costs money. My wife was a RN for 15 years and LOVED her patients and loved her job. It because more about charting and juggling more and more patients instead of actual care. She was heartbroken that the job devolved into basically fast food medical care.
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Somehow, thankfully, my org has been able to keep above water on that and keep the wages/quality up. We are a not-for-profit and thankfully Atlanta has some really big donors. We are also big on the consolidation front and using a partner program to drive electives into our surgery centers.
I don't hear a lot of complaints from within (although we could always do better) but man, at industry events...