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Alexandra Robbins We Need More Nurse Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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Alexandra Robbins We Need More Nurse Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Rhetorical Analysis of "We Need More Nurses"
The article, "We Need More Nurses", was written by Alexandra Robbins for the New York Times on May 28, 2015. This article is listed as an op-ed article, or opinion editorial, meaning that it was written to state the opinion of an outside author not affiliated with the newspaper. Robbins specifically wrote this article as a response to her book, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital, which tells of stories inside one of New York City's most prestigious hospitals and how they "cope" with the nursing shortage. The book follows the story of a nurse, given the fake name Molly, and how she deals with the decline in patient care due to hospital understaffing
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In the book of the anonymous nurse, she mentions sadly how hospitals worked by saying, "The nurse-patient ratio is insane, the hallways are full of patients, most patients aren’t seen by the attending until they’re ready to leave, and the policies are really unsafe." While it is the anonymous nurse's first time working in this hospital in New York, it is not her first time working in hospital; this makes the shortage of nurses a universal problem in the healthcare system. In a study of patient to nurse ratio, for every 100 critical patients who died a nurse was assigned 4 other critical patients, and for every 131 critical patients who died a nurse was assigned 7 other critical patients. Critical patients need more one on one care than others, and if a nurse is assigned multiple, then the nurse can give them the full attention that is needed. However according to the article, the author uses ethos to show it is not a serious problem to hospital itself because nurses have been punished for speaking out on behalf of their patients. Since nurses are not high up in the healthcare profession, hospitals have threatened their jobs and put the blame on them. Although, nurses are pressured into taking on more assignments than they can handle. This pressure leads

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