Unions

[denuseri]

Yes a shortage driven by the hospital administration and its corperate intrests itself by reducing the number of nurses to the bare mininum required by law on the floor at any given time. Work on a hospital floor anywhere where big money is involved and you will see when the ratio falls bellow the standard the Rn's are floated to another floor or sent home so as to avoid having to pay them.

This is the old 8 patients to one nurse ratio which was determined by the insurance companies working in collussion with corperate intrests as the best way to make sure the staff is constantly running its ass off with an "aceptable" number of mishapes it produces to be solved through minimal pay out to the agrieved patients families under the table if possible when litigation occurs is considered to be "profitable".

Of course the thin white legal hospital administrative line composed of a mixture of lawers and other specialists makes for pursuit of redress to be allmost as hard to discover in the first place let alone pursue as a lawsuit against a cop or judge.

In states where the Union was able to scrap together enough backing the ratio was finally set to 4 patients per nurse, so we could maby do some actual patient care while at work instead of running from patient to patient pushing meds and charting all day ...

( a day thats supposed to only be composed of 12 hours per shift and never back to back, which allmost allways ends up being closer to 15, and only supposed to consist of no more than 3 consecutive 12 hr shifts in a row, and never a double, which ussually turns out to be at least 4 shifts with at least one of them being a double)

... in a dangerous rush to keep up, but its hardely strictly enforced by any of the government authorities since they never get to observe the actual ratios since the hospitals are allways warned of their arivals and allowed to touch up things before they get there and they are placed in office by the very people who dont want them to strictly enforce anything.

Allowing greedy bastards who dont give a hoot about actual patient care so much as their profit margins to run things is hardely the answer there.

Unfortuntately that is the "American" Health Care System in a nut shell.