I say this somewhat in jest, but the nurses in the Short-Staffed article are eating good and don’t know it. I’ll also reiterate that ya’ll’s healthcare/insurance system is seriously weird. Down here, docs get paid by the hospital just like nurses, so I’m used to the docs suffering just as much (with belligerents on boths sides, who make their side look bad while making everyone’s jobs harder).
I don’t think the US could truly run out of nurses, even if AI was eliminated, while job conditions remain the same. The scenario described at the start of the article would be “a good day” elsewhere, I’m not even being sarcastic. Only having a twenty minute delay in giving the patient their meds? I’ve worked at ‘good’ hospitals, by my country’s standards and it is not newsworthy that pain med administration is often delayed by four hours, not to mebtion antibiotics and a host of other basic care.
The hospital admin, for the same reason given in the article, is the cause, but it’s only exacerbated by nurses who seem to take pleasure in defying “the system” by ignoring the patients. There’s a roughly one-hour handover procedure when nurses switch their shift and it is made to seem anathema to ask them for anything during this (at least twice daily) period, as well as every four hours when they’re serving medication. Doctors then don’t help this by being horridly rude to the nurses (especially the ones who actually are breaking their backs trying to help the patient) for no reason, or making ridiculous demands that waste everybody’s time. Then, when well-meaning doctors do request things, the nurses take that pent-up frustration out on them, and everybody blames the other for why the patient didn’t receive x or y in time. Ofc, the hospital will just push out a memo “reminding everyone” that patient care is our number one priority, etc., and sweeps it under the rug.
Nurses here don’t do any kind of blood-letting, and rarely ‘have the time’ to take patients to get anything done outside of the ward. A common situation in the afternoon for a doctor is coming onto the ward and trying to ignore the sounds of patients ‘in the back’ wailing (whether because they soiled themselves/haven’t had their food delievered/are in unrelieved pain, for hours), sidestepping the urine/vomit spills that haven’t been wiped up because the ancillary staff, like the culinary staff, is also overworked and under strain, explaining to an angry relative why it took you eight hours to give them an update because there was no one else to assist, and you had to excuse yourself from clinic to go do CPR on one of your patients on the ward, who then needed to be taken to radiology/OT, and there were no nurses available, so you had to tag along and wait beside them yourself, only getting back to clinic four hours later, because radiology/anaesthesiology is also short-staffed.
At clinic, you still have 80% of your ‘normal’ patient load to see because all your other colleagues glt called to the ER/similar urgent situation/had a class to teach or something. Of course, you don’t want to rush and miss critical information with the clinic patients, worse after they’ve waited so long (assuming they were able to skip work that long and even stay), but you still get interrupted around twice an hour by calls froms nurses saying that Mr. So & So with sepsis will be missing his antibiotica today again because his IV is again, down, and they need a doctor to replace it, oh and by the way, so and so is getting angrym wondering when you’re coming to talk to them because it’s been four hours since they asked to see you about questions you need to answer, regarding their relative, and you should probably come now. Of course, you can also hear the patients in the waiting room cursing at you for taking so long to come to them, so you can’t move until four hours later when, all being well, if nothing else happens – like another patient crashing, etc., you can go and talk to xyz… sometimes, to hear that they’ve been waiting all this time to find our why the nurses have not been giving their relative his medication on time.
(NB, some doctors do skip clinic to go to the mall to post to their food blog when they can, and some nurses (and doctors) do have it just as bad, if not worse).
My point of all of this is that, nurses here, and in many other places, think of nursing in the US as heaven for this exact reason. Similarly, hard as it still is for me to believe, we have nurses and doctors coming here from other countries talking about how we don’t know how good we have it. At the end of the day though, at least PE and neoliberalization wins.
Sorry for any typos (I’m sure there are many) but if I take any longer I will be late for my clinic…
