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Get ready. The Affordable Care Act is here, "Obamacare". Its in place and people are signing up for insurance and they will keep doing that. It ain't going anywhere. Its going to change healthcare.Why? It is going to force medicine to decrease costs. Its going to expose how ridiculously expensive health care is in this country. How inefficient. How medicine has basically become a "cover your butt" and "order as many tests as possible" system.
Health care in this day and age is about one thing: money Making more of it. for hospital corporations and their administrators salaries and bonuses, doctors in specialties, insurance companies, drug companies, medical supply manufacturers. Gone are the days (is they ever really existed) of trying to help people and do whats best for them, replaced by greed.
So how will all of this affect nursing? You can just about guess. Here's a list:
1) Just because there may be more patients, don't expect more nurses. You will be expected to do more and more.
2) Layoffs. They're coming. The corporation I work for has said they need to cut $100 million in the next year. This is code for: get ready for layoffs.
3) Cut in benefits. Most nurses have decent health insurance. Expect to be changed to lesser plans with higher deductibles. Pensions are on the way out. Raises will be small.
4) Attempt to use paraprofessionals: Do you work with EMTS in ER? Get ready for management proposing they start to do more nursing tasks.
5) Part of your evaluation will talk about whether you have had any complaints. "Patient satisfaction" is the new buzz phrase
Pretty depressing huh? Yeah it is. I feel I have lived in an era that future.nurses will look back on and wish they could have worked during it. With unions we have had good pay raises, benefits, control of our profession.
That's changing. Young nurses, like young people do, don't realize what went into getting nurses to this point. They don't care. They don't plan on spending 20 or 30 years in one place. Retirement is far off. They are healthy so insurance isn't as important.
I honestly wonder if nursing will survive the huge changes ahead of us.
1 comment:
Yeppers. That's just another reason why I quit RN school after a year: Have already been in the workforce elsewhere, and I concur that the good old days of nursing, which was like, what, the 1990s through 2006, are gone. Hospital admin knows that many nurses are good submissive homemaker and church women, and that the nursing schools have further indoctrinated them with the spirit of obedience and the need to be a good little girl people-pleaser, instead of a powerful and effective woman. Admin and some physicians take advantage of the self-sacrificing culture of nursing. That's plain as day.
Nurses are going to have increasingly more taken away from them,unless they can learn how to stand up for themselves. Unfortunately, RN schools drive out anyone who is the personality type that will buck the system. I figured out after 1 year of hospital-based training (diploma school) that the healthcare industry really is decades behind science and industrywhen it comes to empowerment of women, and considers nurses as disposable as a paper gown.
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