It's true what we nurses say, "Once a nurse always a nurse."
Two articles caught my attention. Both of them had to do with nurses, nursing and our health care.
"More Stringent Requirements Send Nurses Back to School " reports on the growing number of hospital employers who are mandating that nurses return to school to earn a bachelor's degree in nursing. Such policies are not yet widespread among hospitals but the numbers are growing. Lawmakers are seizing an opportunity to also mandate higher education. Excerpt.
"Such policies are limited to a small fraction of the nation’s more than 5,000 hospitals — while no definitive count exists, they tend to be teaching hospitals in major metropolitan areas — but the number is rising fast. Hospital and nursing school officials say most hospitals insisting on bachelor’s degrees began doing so in the last five years, like Abington, a suburban hospital north of Philadelphia, which adopted its policy in 2010.
Surveys show that most hospitals prefer to hire nurses with bachelor’s degrees, though they often cannot find enough. Lawmakers in several states, including New York, have introduced bills that would require at least some hospital staff nurses to have bachelor’s degrees within 10 years, though none have become law."
Who here still thinks nurses carry water and take vital signs? Nurses influence serious treatment decisions, as reported by one of the nurses interviewed for the story. Excerpt.
"But a bachelor’s program sets a high a bar for many would-be nurses and working nurses, who are older than their counterparts of a generation ago and are more likely to have family obligations. It is, increasingly, a second career; the typical starting age is around 30.
“My school puts more pressure on us, no question, and more household stuff falls to the wayside,” said Ms. Matton, 37, sitting in her kitchen and eating a hamburger her husband had waiting when she got home. She shifted a few years ago to working part time.
Yet she endorses the bachelor’s requirement, pointing to the high stakes of her job, working in the emergency room. On a recent day that she described as slow, she had treated, among others, a middle-aged man who fainted in the heat and needed a cardiac work-up, a young woman in withdrawal from an opiate addiction, a pregnant woman with abdominal pain who spoke no English, an elderly woman with a badly infected thumbnail, an elderly man with gastrointestinal bleeding who had an adverse reaction to a plasma transfusion, and a young man whose tingling hands, head pain and elevated blood pressure persuaded a doctor to order a CT scan.
“It blows me away how much influence nurses have on serious treatment decisions,” Ms. Matton said. “After going back to school, I think more critically about what we’re doing, and I have a better understanding of why we’re doing it.”"
TIP: It's about time we demanded more of the institutions that hold the lives of our loved ones in their hands.
TIP: We need more education about decision-making, infection control, medication errors and, while we're at it let's also make sure that all healthcare providers all along the line can read, write and speak English.
TIP: If you have a moment, check out this first in a new series: Bedside. [Health care is about more than doctors and patients: sometimes the best perspectives come from the people who see both sides, the nurses. Bedside probes the complexities of the system within a human context, looking for ways to make health care better and more humane.]
TIP: Teresa Brown makes a strong argument for the Affordable Care Act in her commentary, "Money Or Your Life." Excerpt.
"My patient with leukemia is dead. He got the best care money could buy, but his disease only briefly went into remission and he went home on hospice care. Should he, because he did not buy insurance, have been denied this chance for a cure?
The Affordable Care Act is not the health care solution everyone wants, but when patients wish for death panels as a response to leukemia, something needs to be done, and soon. This plan would help any patient facing a tough diagnosis not view treatment as a choice between his money or his life."
TIP: To the Justices of the Supreme Court: read the above commentary before you vote.
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