and like I work at one of the good hospitals. We're consistently ranked top in our state. Our employee turnover is super low. Employee satisfaction is fairly high comparatively.
But even my hospital values making the shareholders an extra dime over all else. Even my hospital staffs nearly double the safe amount of patients per nurse. Even my hospital brings in as many new patients as possible right at the holidays when the holiday coverage is low because butts in beds equals money. Even my hospital sees employees, especially nurses, as disposable. Burn them out for as long as you can, placate them with Daisy awards and free pizza, then when that stops working get a new one.
And it's just insane because as a therapist I legally cannot see more than 6 patients at a time. They recognize that that is not safe or beneficial and the hospital would be in trouble if they forced me to see more than that. But there's no such standard for nurses. Why staff safely when you could put 20 patients on one nurse and then blame her for anything that goes wrong when that inevitably goes wrong?
and the real frustration here is that most issues in the hospital system, when you really drive down to the root of it, could be solved or made significantly better by safe staffing. But we're not allowed to say that. So we have committees and meetings and hire experts and do internal reviews and bring in motivational speakers and throw pizza parties all to solve the issue that is unsafe staffing.
Because saying the solution out loud means we have to hire more nurses, pay them, protect them, make their job safe to do, not burn through them. And that costs money.
So instead we have a thousand committees dedicated to finding Creative Solutions. How can we get patients to stop falling in the hospital? We must ignore the blatantly obvious answer!! Let's set timers for the nurses to check on every patient x amount of times per hour all night and make sure patients are safely in bed (and then another committee and another meeting to deal with complaints of patients being woken up too much at night -- blame the nurses, why aren't they clustering care to avoid waking patients??), put together a checklist of things the nurse has to do before leaving any room (put the alarms on, make sure the patient has yellow grippy socks on, put the call light in reach, put one rail up, move the tray table so it's inconvenient for the patient to get up alone, anticipate the patient's every move!!) and then we need another committee to discuss why nurse response times are so slow, why was this nurse in one room for thirty minutes?! You should be in and out in under 10 or you're neglecting other patients!!
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