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Up to 10 hospital patients in Oregon died from tap water injections instead of fentanyl: report
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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Holy fuck.
This is why we need to provide both careful vhetting and a positive work environment for folks like nurses, teachers, etc. These people literally hold our lives in their hands, the future of our kids, etc. It should be a high bar to get in, then we should treat them with the respect/compensation that their role deserves because you get what you pay for.
Nursing supervisor here. Let me tell you a story just in case you might have been able to sleep tonight. I work in a long-term care facility, and most of our staff of nurses is from a staffing agency, which has the same effect as a union. Normally I'm all for unions, except many of these nurses feel incredibly entitled to work how and whenever they want. If I ask them to go fill a vacancy on a different unit that they don't want to work on, they will just cry oppression, and threaten to leave that very minute, which they are able to do because they come from a staffing agency and not our facility. There is literally no scenario where we can just not have nurses, so we are forced to bend around backwards to let them have whatever they want, come on to shift as late as they want, etc, or we have no staff to run a facility and care for patients. At least in my area, shitty nurses are better than no nurses, and many of them choose to weaponize this fact. I'll just reiterate that I am myself a working registered nurse, and these are the facts that I deal with everyday.
Edit: in case it wasn't clear, I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses, and I frequently end up on a med cart to fill those vacancies I mentioned. The nursing shortage is really bad you guys.
I know, let’s use temporary nurses that aren’t as qualified: we can pay them less and no benefits. That will increase the number of nurses
And decrease the amount of people on social security.
"I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses"*
*Except to advocate that our cheap ass private equity owned facility hire actual full time staff with benefits instead of outsourcing to a temp agency.
Those agency nurses aren't your enemy. They aren't the reason you end up taking an assignment. That's the fault of the corporation that owns you. And in all sincerity, good for those agency nurses demanding the working conditions that they want and refusing to accept whatever the facility wants to push on them.
Sincerely, a hospital nurse having our union election on Jan 10
(And I have stories too, you know. Like my supervisor who tonight simply lied to the overnight sup about our staffing situation and tried to leave two nurses alone to care for NINE patients on our critical care stepdown unit overnight.)
The nursing shortage is at least partially artificial. There is a shortage of nurses who are willing to work in abusive conditions that exploit our legal, moral, and professional obligations to our patients to make their profit. Fight these corporations for safe working conditions and watch how many nurses return to the bedside.
This isn't about some grandiose violation of workers rights. This is about people who would allow somebody's incontinent, confused grandmother to sit in her own feces for an hour because she refuses to work near someone who criticized the condition of her car or some similar nonsense. She's refusing to do parts of the job that she signed on to do simply because she doesn't want to do it. That's not being an empowered worker, or standing up for yourself, that's just being a child.
As for that line about advocacy. I have no more ability to enact changes like this than the janitors do. I'm not on the board of directors or anything, I just get placed as nursing supervisor periodically when I'm not doing my normal job.
I'll tell you right now, this place is not good. It's run by an outfit called Genesis, and they're terrible at everything, but there are residents here who don't have anywhere else to go, so I take care of them to the best of my ability.
Trust me, I started out my career working for a private equity owned SNF/LTC. Those places are horrifically terrible and should be outlawed.
And your particular issue with this individual nurse isn't really because they're agency. We have that kind of problem with full time regular nurses in our hospital being unprofessional children. But also our hospital corporation likes to play on our compassion to exploit us when in reality, that grandmother sitting in her feces is their fault for refusing to staff our fucking hospital properly.
I absolutely agree that a major portion of the issue comes back to whoever is writing the checks for staffing and so forth, but consider the following as well: on occasion, some unions can be guilty of over lenience when it comes to accountability of the employees involved (ask me about some phone calls I overheard from one of my patients who was a union leader of the local chapter of the Teamsters Union), but on the whole the results are much better than for staffing agencies. The problem is because someone can't just go to a different union if they don't like the conditions, and everyone is on the same playing field. If a nurse works for a staffing agency, and feels that they are being oppressed by corrective actions because they don't feel like coming in on time, or doing basic parts of their job, they can just choose to go to a different staffing agency with more flexible interpretations of policy, who will be happy to take them because reasons. It becomes a race to the top for facilities for patient survey scores, and a race to the bottom for staffing agencies for a accountability of their staff.
That's just free market labor. Shit hospital nurses are free to bounce from facility to facility as well. Welcome to America.
A union gives me more power to enact change inside my own corporation-owned facility. Staffing negotiations give me leverage to force staffing levels that keep my patients both safe and receiving the care that they need.
I had a woman sitting in her own feces for over an hour on Sunday because our hospital chooses not to staff the central stock room on weekends and holidays, and we were completely out of the only size briefs that would fit her. I checked the next unit over and they were out too. This is a standard item that should be stocked at all times. I had to ask one of our transporters hunt them down for us.
Part of our union contract will be to demand that our local unit supply rooms are stocked no less than once per day 365 days a year. It's INSANE that an American hospital chooses to operate without that.
"The union" doesn't do anything. WE are the union. I AM the union. I'm planning to be one of the people sitting right there at the negotiation table working on our contract. WE will be the ones negotiating how disciplinary grievances are handled and the union only exists to provide us with legal representation to ensure that OUR chosen contract terms are adhered to.
Why do American nurses in particular believe such heinous lies and propaganda about how unions work? You overheard some hearsay from someone about a union that doesn't even represent nurses and you just swallowed that hook, line, and sinker?
Okay. A lot to unpack here. You're right that nurses can go to a different facility to work, but not nearly as easily or quickly as they can move staffing agencies in the current climate. At this point, you can pretty much just call a new agency and say that you can start tomorrow, and somebody will make that happen for you.
I want a preface but I'm about to say by saying that I do ultimately like the idea of unions, but it's just as dangerous to say that they're evil as it is to say that they are perfectly, and infallibly good. A union is simply a group of people uniting for collective benefit. One person cannot be a Union. What would they be uniting with? The power of a union is in their numbers.
With regard to the last point, I think you need to look up what hearsay is. I literally heard the guy say it over the phone with my own ears. The short version of the story is that one of his guys was a truck driver who got impatient and chose to drive a fully loaded semi around a closed railroad crossing and got hit by a train causing, what he kept referring to as around a million dollars in damage. Obviously his supervisor tried to fire him on the spot. It's miraculous that no one died, and I don't want a truck driver like that on the road where me and my family drive, but he used the threat of collective action to get the guy his job back because, in his words, "he has had no other disciplinary action in the last 5 years that he's worked there ". In my humble opinion, when your actions cause you to be not only a poorly performing employee, but actually in danger public safety with your actions, I think that is a valid termination, but the union wouldn't let it happen.
Police unions are the most guilty of this. You can read all the time about cops who get put on 30 days of paid leave after they beat the shit out of a handcuffed black guy during a traffic stop or something.
I was being hyperbolic; I thought that would be obvious.
You and I must work in very different current climates.
You didn't personally experience that anecdote (and it's also just an anecdote). Show me a NURSING union that protects people who are dangers to that level. We don't because it's not our professional culture, so it's not how we run our unions. The president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association is still a practicing nurse. She has no personal or professional interest in protecting nurses who are genuinely dangerous.
I also have 20 years experience in management prior to becoming a nurse, including quality, safety and accident investigation experience. One accident doesn't prove that an employee is bad, no matter how much damage it cost. Systemic errors exist. Was that guy being impatient because management was on his ass to do more and more with less and less support? Holding him to an impossible schedule like they do the rail workers? How was he able to have his truck in a situation like that in the first place? Did he bypass safety signalling/communication, or did the signaling/communication policies not exist in the first place? If that driver was genuinely a dangerous employee and had no prior disciplinary action, then that's a management failure to document concerning actions in the past. None of that has anything to do with the union and the union was right to stick to the letter of the contract.
And policing needs to be reformed top to bottom. Union protection alone is not sufficient to create the culture of abusive power that exists in modern policing. That requires the full complicity of our legislative and judicial branches. (See: "tough on crime" politicians and SCOTUS shielding cops from accountability and responsibility.)
It's not even that. They are already in the building. I am just asking them to go and work on a different unit that had two people call out 15 minutes before shift start. I literally had a nurse look at me and say "I'm too valuable to be disrespected like that. If you don't start treating me right, I'm walking out that same door I came in." This was after I asked her to go do the exact same job she was doing on an adjacent unit where she didn't like one of the aids there.
No. Working in the medical field shouldn't mean having a destroyed personal life better fucking healthxare insurance complex refuses to train and retain more workers. Tell you what, the day I get to call up the CEO of Aetna or some other heakth insurance company and tell him he has to report to duty is the day you can demand thee same from nurses.
Your hypothetical does not accurately reflect anything about how the healthcare system works.
No transplant surgeon is getting a surprise shift. This is exactly why on-call shifts exist. There is already someone available who knows they need to be ready to go at a moment's notice.
And nurses don't function the same as doctors. We are regular wage employees, just like anyone working retail. We absolutely do not have to be available whenever and wherever. They can (and do, constantly) ask us to pick up shifts. But we're not obligated to come in on our scheduled days off.
Healthcare corporations need to get their fucking staffing models together.
You literally have no idea what you're talking about. Doctors don't work for wages. Their labor model is completely different from nurses.
Doctors don't work FOR WAGES meaning they are not hourly wage employees. Their pay structure is completely different, which means their LABOR MODEL is completely different. Of course they work for money.