Question
Ah! Oh! The trucking industry isn't the only ones consistently targeted by NBC. Here comes this sad topic again. It unfortunately never gets resolved. http://www.msnbc.com/news/340525.asp
The report says that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die from mistakes every year in hospitals alone.
I can only wonder. The hospital I used to work at hires new grads for their ICU's. Of the 20 they trained last year, only 2 are left. If managed health care doesn't require experience, and only gives a few days orientation even to new grads, I can only wonder what the outcome is for the poor patients.
Answer
So sad and so true. As a critical care nurse, I can't count the number of times the nurses headed off potentially fatal errors. A patient in ICU never has just one Doc. There is the ER physician, Admitting physician, ICU Internists on each shift, Residents, Interns, and a host of others who rarely communicate with each other except for notes in the chart. And contrary to popular beleif, one Doc's handwriting is just as illegible to other Docs as it is to anyone else. Half the time, they can't tell you what the previous Doc wrote.
Each Doc comes thru, glances at the chart, scribbles a few notes and orders, and moves on. 5 minutes later, they can't even tell you if the patient is male or female.
It is almost always a well trained nurse who notices conflicting orders, medication errors, and deterioration in the patient's condition. But let a nurse try to challenge a Drs. order! You better have your body armor on! And let that Doc make a mistake and he will find a way to blame it on the lab, respiratory therapy, the pharmacy, the nurses.....anybody but the Doc.
Another sad thing is the way hospitals utilize their ancillary personnel. There was a situation a few years back when the hospital I was working for decided to save money on nursing personnel by allowing the houskeeping staff to give bedpans to patients, walk patients to the bathroom, etc. The kitchen staff was going to be allowed to do the same types of things. Nurses aides were going to be allowed to suction trachs, adjust IV rates, and so on.
That's when I decided I was OUT OF THERE! No way was the hospital going to use my license to cover their butts while 'saving money'.
Can't you just see the person delivering a food tray getting a fresh hip repair out of bed???????? And who handed down this decision? The CFO of the hospital!
Once again, you have a situation where a lot of hospital administration is decided by persons with NO MEDICAL TRAINING whatsoever.
Is it any wonder errors are made?
I recently had a knee reconstruction. My surgeon wanted me to have it done under general anesthesia and spend 24 hours in the hospital post-op for pain control.
I chose (and insisted upon) a spinal anesthetic, 4 hours in the recovery room and HOME! There was no way I was spending 24 hours in a hospital on drugs! I know what can happen and I wasn't taking chances.
I had faith in my surgeon, he is a good Doc. The hospital has a good reputation but is staffed with "Traveling nurses". Temporary nurses who move around from area to area.
These nurses are signed on without any interviews, no reference checks, no background, nothing. Just wave a license and they are in the door.
Some are very good, others are horrible.
Our ER was using lots of them until an audit showed that 48% of ER errors were due to the use of temporary nurses. The ER director kept trying to get her budget increased in order to hire and retain permanent nurses by citing this percentage of errors. You know what she got? Staffing cuts! More TEMPS!!!! The decision maker? The CFO again!
It did not change until admitting physicians started using other hospitals and refusing to send patients to that ER. Can't say that I blame them. By the time that happened I was long gone. Unfortunately, that hospital now has a bad reputation that will take a long time to live down.
But you know what? Dig deep enough into these things and it will eventually come out that the health insurance industry is a key player in a lot of this stuff.
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Keeping you safe, healthy, and on the road.
Nurse Red
Visit us at www.Truck.net/abmsVisit us at
Answer
Boy you said alot there Nurse Red. I feel the same way about hospitals. In 1992 I had a bad fall (outside the hospital work setting) and ruptured a disc and had immediate foot drop on my left leg. I so dreaded going to the hospital I waited a month until I finally couldn't get out of bed to go to work that I finally agreed to go for surgery. I endured excruciating pain that whole month before I went in, just to avoid the hospital experience and still went to work everyday I was scheduled. Post-op I bled quite a bit through my dressing. I lay in the bed half gorked on the anesthesia and feeling "wet" behind me. I fought to get my drugged brain awake enough to get out of the bed "to see" what was going on, which I was evenutally able to do. I put on my call lite and eventually someone answered. When I told them I had bled all over the bed--could they come and check--a nurse's aide finally came down the hall to look. She was pretty shocked and I was still standing by the bed, too drugged to really know what I was doing. After that I demanded they take out my IV and was determined to go home that night.After everything settled down, I put my robe on and started walking, determined to go home. When doc made the rounds that night at 10 p he said "I hear you have been walking, can we do anything for you?" And I said "Yes you can discharge me home right now" He wasn't too happy about it, but he did. I never even went down to Birmingham to have my stitches out--I just had one of my doc friends up here take them out.
I am not going to the hospital anymore unless one of my nurse friends runs interference for me. If you are not subject to gross error, there is always one of the super infections you can get if you stay long enough. More so now, that managed health care does not feel housekeeping is cost effective. The last place I worked, the nurse's were cleaning the OR rooms between cases (yeh, right!) because they had cut the housekeeping staff. No one has a clue because the Supreme Court ruled several years ago that nurses were administration because we supervised nurse's aides (not like we could hire or fire them) and therefore if we did any whistle-blowing we could be immediately fired without recourse. Since everyone needed that paycheck, a code of silence sanctioned by the highest court in the land became in effect. If a nurse told a patient that complained about his/her care that the reason she hadn't been in his room in the last three hours is because she had 15 other patients, she could be fired.
No one realizes what goes on, nor do they care until they or someone they love becomes an unsuspecting victim of managed health care/insurance companies. I think that is pretty evident by the fact that whenever your bring up the subject of managed health care that we are the only two who ever respond. I guess that is why I am such an alternative therapy person for myself and my family. Even my husband does not think it is as bad as I make it out to be, and why I push the herbs and vitamins his way; he had to get on here and ask newyork2 about it,how he stays healthy. I still think it freaks him out that I left a bad managed health care situation where I was driving 50 miles one way to a Catholic run hospital that was 100 miles away, just because I don't want to be a part of that situation. But you know Nurse Red,it's sad to say but at the stress level most truck drivers live under, the cigarettes they smoke, the inactivity they experience over a lifetime of trucking, the chemicals they are exposed to, they will all be in the hospital at one time or another in their later lives as a patient. Then everyone will see what we are talking about.
[This message has been edited by RunningSoLate (edited November 30, 1999).]