The Pros And Cons Of Look After Nurses
Perhaps one the most respected professions on this planet is certainly being a nurse, of any kind, whether you are a Licensed Vocational Nurse, Registered Nurse or a Nursing Assistant, the amount of adoration that follows those jobs around is obvious to most. But one of the better kept details of the downside of being a nurse are often mocked as mistreatment from doctors and administration who belittle them hilariously on TV or patients who are cranky old men who don’t want to take their medication that the nurse had to bend over backwards to get despite it being regular Tylenol. With this much grief, fowl treatment and downright abuse, there are still champions that fight for a career that changes lives on a daily basis in nearly all parts
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of the globe. Which makes the following all the harder to handle. Drug addiction among nurses is concurrent with the national average of 10%, that means that every hospital in America likely has at least a few nurses who are addicted to narcotics with some reports saying as high as 1 in 5 nurses are drug addicts with all the ailments that accompany this monstrous disease. Hospitals are tricky places to work at, between the doctors thinking that they run the place, nurses who think they run the place and everyone else thinking they run the place, there’s clearly a lot of passing the buck and letting someone else take care of an issue.
When that issue happens to be a nurse stealing powerful pain medication, what can be done “nurses look after nurses”. Hospitals are multi-million dollar establishments, so minimizing scandal is incredibly important, so even if a nurse is caught abusing drugs, it has to depend on who caught them and unless it is traced back to the hospital and they are liable a hospital won’t pursue any action most of the time. Nurses and doctors are encouraged to join a self help group for their treatment, there are programs specifically designed to help them after they’ve left. However, these programs are run through each state’s individual Board of Nursing, these boards have no distinction between those who seek help, those who are caught and those who have hit rock bottom. This translates to no incentive for a nurse who is currently using drugs on the job, the scary part of that is there are no definitive numbers on how many nurses are currently using drugs, who they have harmed, how badly those people have been harmed so on and so forth. The nearest estimates, according to the FDA there are over 1 million serious medication errors every year in the US, that equates to at least one patient death every …show more content…
day.
A Brief History of the Issue nurse shortage
Drug addiction has only become less of a stigma in the past 15 years, thanks to an increase in awareness of addiction and its toll on an individual, a family and indeed the whole human family. As we have learned how to forgive and heal together, the difficulty in humanizing drug addicts is still quite real, especially when we are trying to find sympathy for someone who has our life in their hands.
Perhaps one of the most unique challenges the medical industry faces when treating its nurses is finding people to replace the ones who are away to get help.
The reason why this is so important is because there are no time or resources to help most of these nurses. There has been a national nursing shortage, and we have been in one off and on since the 1930s. This is something that truly affects us all, because of the growing rate of people over the age of 65, the average age of an RN has jumped from 42.7 years in 2000 to 44.6 in 2010. There are scores of reports and estimates that go as high as a 20% increase in job openings for nurses by 2022, yet those positions are being filled at a much slower rate. An aging workforce caring for an even larger and more medically diverse, older generation leads to major trouble for us
all.
The hardships put on nurses over the years has been growing exponentially, with new legislation, technology, administration policies and insurance businesses having more vested interests, has created a huge demand out of small supply. The history of stress has compounded the problem for years and is only becoming more troublesome as progress marches on faster than nursing schools can keep up.
Hospital Policies and State Law Turns out that the TV show House actually showcased hospital worker, addiction pretty accurately by showing the titular character eating painkillers like they were trail mix on hospital grounds. While it is not so blatantly obvious as that, the fact that there’s very little to overcome when you want drugs as a working nurse. A common way for nurses to feed their habit is to simply falsify medication orders, pocket leftovers from an order or almost any other simple slight of hand trick, no matter how childish because hospitals are full of headless chickens and they can’t watch everything all the time. The ease of skirting past punishment varies, but for some it was as easy as having a friendly supervisor throw out a doctor’s eyewitness account of falsified reports according to one article. Hospital policies and even state policies vary based on the crime, it’s rather hard to say this, but it honestly depends on who you are, where you are and how badly you got caught. Don’t misunderstand, if a nurse high on morphine accidently kills a kid, there’s no way that they can be protected anywhere. However, something small like an intentional paperwork error can garner the same degree of punishment. It’s a system that only gets worse the more complicated we make it caring for each other.
Possible Solutions
While widespread change is complex and will take a long time, focusing on treating the individual is a smaller goal to tackle. If nurses are lucky enough to seek help with limited repercussions then treating their depression and anxiety disorders will help go further than shaming them. Nurses are twice as more likely to suffer from depression as the average American with 18% showing symptoms, according to a recent study published in 2012. Now those don’t sound like alarming numbers when compared to the numbers for drug addiction, but those numbers are related and the cost of missed work days for treatment of said problems costs billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and creates major problems for patients who are missing the unbridled care a qualified nurse can provide. In spite of the international respect a nurse receives, recruiting a new generation to become a registered nurse is proving to be very difficult. It is widely known that physicians are some of the worst bosses on the planet. The horror stories of doctors and hospitals treating their nurses like Post-it notes and anger bins could shake even the strongest people to their core. In addition to well known cases of abuse from their bosses, nurses are also getting the short end of the stick from the people they are treating. According to a study by the ANA in 2011, the reported incidents of physical and verbal abuse of nurses lowered to 31.4%.
On top of those statistics, attending an RN program in this country at a major university cost between 20 and 30 thousand dollars in tuition alone. Factoring in books, living expenses and various equipment and lab fees and a nursing student at a major university is looking forward to paying over 100 thousand dollars for their education. Community colleges also offer RN programs at considerably reduced fees with the average cost being about 1/5th the price.
Plan of Action There are a lot of ways that we can help these nurses and one of the first ways to do this is to find a better way of helping those who want to get help and punishing those who refuse to get it. As mentioned before, there is no system installed for differentiating between the ones who were caught and the ones who confessed. This is important because most of the programs in place to help nurses treat their addiction are for former nurses and doctors. We need to adapt those successful programs so they can implemented and used by nurses who are still in the field. If a nurse is undergoing treatment for their addiction and not in an in-house rehab facility (most aren’t) they are still going to need to work. My possible solution is to hire more nurses part-time to help cover the workload, this is good for those new nurses as well, when you consider the burnout rate for new nurses is among the highest in the medical industry. By giving new nurses, especially those who are working in the mental health and oncology a taste of what they can expect out of their career choice, the typical 8 to 13 week burnout rate has a significant chance to go down. The cost of running a hospital no matter what size is millions upon millions of dollars every year, month and sometimes an everyday day. There are a lot of ways that we can reduce the cost of caring for people, but there are greater minds than mine at play when it comes to making health care in America better, simply because health care is a business now, it has been longer than I’ve been alive and I doubt it will be changing anytime soon. Conclusion There are a lot of nurses who need help, not just those suffering with addiction, but there are nurses all across the country who need more time, money and some TLC. The resources are there, they may be a little skewed, but that change will come around with time. It’s no surprise that we are in the middle of a health care crisis, regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, health care reform is an immediate concern for everyone, making sure that we have safe, qualified and talented nurses to treat our aging population will make our collective trudge all the easier.
of the globe. Which makes the following all the harder to handle. Drug addiction among nurses is concurrent with the national average of 10%, that means that every hospital in America likely has at least a few nurses who are addicted to narcotics with some reports saying as high as 1 in 5 nurses are drug addicts with all the ailments that accompany this monstrous disease. Hospitals are tricky places to work at, between the doctors thinking that they run the place, nurses who think they run the place and everyone else thinking they run the place, there’s clearly a lot of passing the buck and letting someone else take care of an issue.
When that issue happens to be a nurse stealing powerful pain medication, what can be done “nurses look after nurses”. Hospitals are multi-million dollar establishments, so minimizing scandal is incredibly important, so even if a nurse is caught abusing drugs, it has to depend on who caught them and unless it is traced back to the hospital and they are liable a hospital won’t pursue any action most of the time. Nurses and doctors are encouraged to join a self help group for their treatment, there are programs specifically designed to help them after they’ve left. However, these programs are run through each state’s individual Board of Nursing, these boards have no distinction between those who seek help, those who are caught and those who have hit rock bottom. This translates to no incentive for a nurse who is currently using drugs on the job, the scary part of that is there are no definitive numbers on how many nurses are currently using drugs, who they have harmed, how badly those people have been harmed so on and so forth. The nearest estimates, according to the FDA there are over 1 million serious medication errors every year in the US, that equates to at least one patient death every …show more content…
day.
A Brief History of the Issue nurse shortage
Drug addiction has only become less of a stigma in the past 15 years, thanks to an increase in awareness of addiction and its toll on an individual, a family and indeed the whole human family. As we have learned how to forgive and heal together, the difficulty in humanizing drug addicts is still quite real, especially when we are trying to find sympathy for someone who has our life in their hands.
Perhaps one of the most unique challenges the medical industry faces when treating its nurses is finding people to replace the ones who are away to get help.
The reason why this is so important is because there are no time or resources to help most of these nurses. There has been a national nursing shortage, and we have been in one off and on since the 1930s. This is something that truly affects us all, because of the growing rate of people over the age of 65, the average age of an RN has jumped from 42.7 years in 2000 to 44.6 in 2010. There are scores of reports and estimates that go as high as a 20% increase in job openings for nurses by 2022, yet those positions are being filled at a much slower rate. An aging workforce caring for an even larger and more medically diverse, older generation leads to major trouble for us
all.
The hardships put on nurses over the years has been growing exponentially, with new legislation, technology, administration policies and insurance businesses having more vested interests, has created a huge demand out of small supply. The history of stress has compounded the problem for years and is only becoming more troublesome as progress marches on faster than nursing schools can keep up.
Hospital Policies and State Law Turns out that the TV show House actually showcased hospital worker, addiction pretty accurately by showing the titular character eating painkillers like they were trail mix on hospital grounds. While it is not so blatantly obvious as that, the fact that there’s very little to overcome when you want drugs as a working nurse. A common way for nurses to feed their habit is to simply falsify medication orders, pocket leftovers from an order or almost any other simple slight of hand trick, no matter how childish because hospitals are full of headless chickens and they can’t watch everything all the time. The ease of skirting past punishment varies, but for some it was as easy as having a friendly supervisor throw out a doctor’s eyewitness account of falsified reports according to one article. Hospital policies and even state policies vary based on the crime, it’s rather hard to say this, but it honestly depends on who you are, where you are and how badly you got caught. Don’t misunderstand, if a nurse high on morphine accidently kills a kid, there’s no way that they can be protected anywhere. However, something small like an intentional paperwork error can garner the same degree of punishment. It’s a system that only gets worse the more complicated we make it caring for each other.
Possible Solutions
While widespread change is complex and will take a long time, focusing on treating the individual is a smaller goal to tackle. If nurses are lucky enough to seek help with limited repercussions then treating their depression and anxiety disorders will help go further than shaming them. Nurses are twice as more likely to suffer from depression as the average American with 18% showing symptoms, according to a recent study published in 2012. Now those don’t sound like alarming numbers when compared to the numbers for drug addiction, but those numbers are related and the cost of missed work days for treatment of said problems costs billions of dollars a year in lost productivity and creates major problems for patients who are missing the unbridled care a qualified nurse can provide. In spite of the international respect a nurse receives, recruiting a new generation to become a registered nurse is proving to be very difficult. It is widely known that physicians are some of the worst bosses on the planet. The horror stories of doctors and hospitals treating their nurses like Post-it notes and anger bins could shake even the strongest people to their core. In addition to well known cases of abuse from their bosses, nurses are also getting the short end of the stick from the people they are treating. According to a study by the ANA in 2011, the reported incidents of physical and verbal abuse of nurses lowered to 31.4%.
On top of those statistics, attending an RN program in this country at a major university cost between 20 and 30 thousand dollars in tuition alone. Factoring in books, living expenses and various equipment and lab fees and a nursing student at a major university is looking forward to paying over 100 thousand dollars for their education. Community colleges also offer RN programs at considerably reduced fees with the average cost being about 1/5th the price.
Plan of Action There are a lot of ways that we can help these nurses and one of the first ways to do this is to find a better way of helping those who want to get help and punishing those who refuse to get it. As mentioned before, there is no system installed for differentiating between the ones who were caught and the ones who confessed. This is important because most of the programs in place to help nurses treat their addiction are for former nurses and doctors. We need to adapt those successful programs so they can implemented and used by nurses who are still in the field. If a nurse is undergoing treatment for their addiction and not in an in-house rehab facility (most aren’t) they are still going to need to work. My possible solution is to hire more nurses part-time to help cover the workload, this is good for those new nurses as well, when you consider the burnout rate for new nurses is among the highest in the medical industry. By giving new nurses, especially those who are working in the mental health and oncology a taste of what they can expect out of their career choice, the typical 8 to 13 week burnout rate has a significant chance to go down. The cost of running a hospital no matter what size is millions upon millions of dollars every year, month and sometimes an everyday day. There are a lot of ways that we can reduce the cost of caring for people, but there are greater minds than mine at play when it comes to making health care in America better, simply because health care is a business now, it has been longer than I’ve been alive and I doubt it will be changing anytime soon. Conclusion There are a lot of nurses who need help, not just those suffering with addiction, but there are nurses all across the country who need more time, money and some TLC. The resources are there, they may be a little skewed, but that change will come around with time. It’s no surprise that we are in the middle of a health care crisis, regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, health care reform is an immediate concern for everyone, making sure that we have safe, qualified and talented nurses to treat our aging population will make our collective trudge all the easier.