you go girl

As someone who has been to Saudi Arabia and witnessed these idiot religious police, I think this is pretty cool.

fun ideas for triage

Sitting at the triage desk watching people walk down the hall of shame toward the desk. I love the ones who either walk very hurriedly or sprint toward the desk..

Anyway, I had the idea to make life in the ER a lot easier for everyone concerned. We have this sort of vestibule type area with glass doors that can be locked. At night a security officer sits there are gives out name tags since its the only entrance to the hospital.

So I thought: Have this set up in the vestibule where there is a breathylyzer machine that everyone who wants to be seen in the ER has to blow into. Just think, you would already know the alcohol level of every patient right up front. The machine would instruct them to how to use it and then say:BLOW! BLOW! BLOW! BLOW! BLOW! It wouldn't unlock the door until they did it successfully.

Part# 2: Put a bathroom down there and have everything pee in a cup for a drug screen. You put your specimen into a little door thing in the wall, like at the doctors office. You have to wait for the results before the door will announce your name and unlock the door. This would be useful for drug seekers.

The thing is how would you prevent people who haven't been approved to now move ahead to the triage desk from running through the door when it opens? Hmmmm... We could have a place in the floor that opens and somehow propels the cheaters outside.

It was a slow evening in triage....

my way or the highway

I've been a nurse a long time, as we all know. I have to say that I have probably been working in the best time in nursing. What I mean is that nurses have made progress in wages, benefits, staffing. A lot of our progress was due to a nursing shortage. Hospitals had more money too. Thats no longer the case.

I have this feeling that the time ahead is not going to be positive for nurses. In the last few years there has been a change in hospitals around nursing. For a long time, the administration and nurses in our hospital seemed to work together. The union and the hospital settled fair contracts. That has changed now.

Hospitals are feeling the same economic pressure as the rest of society. As people were laid off, less people had insurance and they used health care less for a couple of years. At the same time, reimbursement from medicare, medicaid, insurance companies continue to decrease. Hospitals are trying to stay afloat.

With all of this change, seems to come a new attitude toward the nursing staff. The relationship between the management and nurses has become adversarial. It has turned into a "I'm the fucking management and I run the show kind of attitude". We all feel it.

If nurses don't start paying attention and standing together, we have a lot to lose. Those wages and benefits and better staffing will fall by the wayside as hospitals work with smaller budgets. Think staffing is bad now, just wait.

What worries me the most are the young nurses who don't understand what it took to get here. The sacrifices nurses made in the past. The reason you have any kind of decent wage, benefits, employee rights is because the nurses in the past fought for it. I wonder if the younger generation of nurses will maintain those benefits or let them slip away.

too much

.

Is it just me or is our job getting harder and harder? To the point where I am really tired of being so tired and working so hard. Its getting to be too much.

oh come all ye faithful

the emergency room - the Mecca of the dysfunctional

dys·func·tion·al

Adjective

1.Not operating normally or properly.
2.Deviating from the norms of social behavior in a way regarded as bad.