A New Start

Hello!

Well I have been in the States for months now and still haven't bought a PC.  Blogging from a crappy tiny laptop notebook thing would probably cause me to loose my hair.  So I am finally going to buy a real desktop computer.

Is anyone even still interested in this Blog?  Should I let it die because I am no longer in the UK? Or do you want to hear some stories from the NHS frontlines that I never dared to post while I was actually physically present in England?

To be honest I was going to let it go.  But then David Cameron's comments about Nurse's doing hourly rounds nearly caused me to choke to death on my own vomit.

He doesn't seem to grasp that one qualified nurse to 15+ patients is not going to be able to get around to everyone she is responsible for in a 12 hour shift.   The only things she is going to be physically capable of handling are the most high priority doctors orders and tasks and emergencies.  Those things are not going to go away at any point in her shift so that she can round.

What Cameron won't admit is that the government has had hiring freezes on qualified nurses for years, decades even, and that the trusts are refusing to pay for more than one or two qualified nurses to staff  40 bedded wards for a 12 hour shift.   The acute medical wards have the sickest most complicated patients outside of critical care and also have the lowest staffing levels of qualified nurses in the hospital.  In addition to that acute medical wards are also bombarded with elderly patients who need one to one care in order to survive and be treated with dignity.  Bombarded is an understatement.  The system simply cannot cope with the growing population of dependment, medically complicated elderly.  It is the same here in the USA.

When qualified Nurses such as myself would call management crying and asking for help because patients were suffering we were told "tough" "not managements problem"  "not within budget" "you aren't getting any help, deal with it" "grow up" "put on your big girl knickers" etc etc etc.

When we would tell management that forcing qualified nurses to fill in hundreds of forms in order to obtain emergency transfusions, medications, labwork, diagnostics, and equipment stopped us from getting near our patients, we were told "tough".  If I had refused to fill in the forms in order to do a Cameron round on my patients I would have been held 100% responsible for any deaths that occured due to missed transfusions, medications, labwork, diagnostics and lack of equipment.  David Cameron knows that this is the situation.  He is not going to admit that government is NEVER going to finance the hospitals properly or force local managers to staff wards with enough qualified Nurses.  So he is trying to pass on the blame for neglect of patients and save his own skin by depicting Nurses as people who just don't care.    I would hope that the public isn't dumb enough to drink that Kool aid but comments I see in the papers make me despair.

In the early 90's hospitals had the bright idea of trying to control costs by reducing the number of qualified Nurses at the bedside.  The managers who control staffing and budgets are people with backgrounds in finance.  They are not people with a background in health care.  They do not understand how crucial qualified Nurses at the bedside are to patient outcomes.  These people also do not hold a license to practice in the way that a doctor or a qualified nurse does.  Therefore they cannot get held responsible for the lapses in care that are caused by their refusal to staff hospitals with enough qualified people.  They make a lot of money from forcing doctors and nurses to take on uncontrollable workloads and by replacing qualified staff with unqualified people.  And they are not the ones who get labelled as uncaring and incompetent by the papers, even though they have total and sole control. They even make it so bad that as a qualified nurse I cannot even control how long I spend with each patient, except to keep the time to less than a minute.  Junior doctors have it a lot worse when they are carrying the bleep for medicine.  

We do care.  But patients sure aren't going to see that side of us when we are prioritizing, overwhelmed, full of anxiety, hungry, exhausted, panicked and scared shitless. And angry.  We ARE ANGRY.  We are not angels, or superhumans or demons or anything else.  We are just plain people trying to do our best. Granted that health care professionals can handle a lot more than most people.  But we are by no means magical, perfect or superman.

When these finance cunts are told that patients are suffering and dying their response to the health care professionals is often "tough" "deal with it" and "sucks to be you, nursey".


Now who is uncaring?  The Nurses and the Doctors?  Don't think so. 

Caring with no control over the situation equals no care at all.  Your doctors and nurses care.  But they are simply cut off from time, resources, control and support from budget driven cunts with MBAs.

By the way, if you walk onto a ward and see support workers and secretaries sitting at the Nurse's station gossiping and cackling .......it is no indication of how busy the Nurses and Doctors are at that moment.  Unqualified staff cannot help us with most tasks. Just an FYI.

So yeah I was pretty sick over David Cameron's comments, enough to want to start blogging again.

My readers have probably all grown old and died by now ;).  But if anyone out there has looked at this, thanks for reading!

Anne