Vanderbilt University Medical Center wants nurses to clean rooms now

I have a lot of readers.  I need your help. I want you to take this blog post and tweet it, copy it, facebook it, refer to it on your blog.

Here's the thing: Vanderbilt University Medical Center has started requiring its nurses to do janitorial work. After a local TV (Eyewitness News 3 in Nashville)  learned of this they interviewed an administrator who said:

"Cleaning the room after the case, including pulling your trash and mopping the floor, are all infection-prevention strategies. And it's all nursing, and it's all surgical tech. You may not believe that, but even Florence Nightingale knew that was true," said a hospital administrator to staff in a video obtained by the Channel 4 I-Team.  One manager said in an email: We have undergone some major budgetary changes ... this means we will need to pull together like never before."

If this sounds like it is just in the OR, alas, no it isn't.  Its all patient rooms.

According to another site (care2 make a difference), Vanderbilt is:

"in the midst of defending itself against lawsuits claiming that they have fired employees in violation of the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA)".   Also:  "The hospital is also in court over accusations that it has been engaging in Medicare fraud for over a decade".  Could this be why a couple thousand employees have been laid off?

Anyway here's the topper to all of this, a nurse administrator told the nurses:

"refrain from speaking negatively about this in an open forum where our customer can hear. If you need to vent come see me."

Well if the nurses at Vanderbilt can't speak about this we will, all over the country...

george clooney doesn't work here (and none of our doctors look like him)

I don't think the public would ever believe what it is really like in an ER.  The people we really deal with.  The average person is not going to come to ER unless they truly are very sick or have an accident or something.  So the majority of people we see are not your average, functioning person.



NOT.

They are the dysfunctional, criminal, crazy people among us.  They are the people you move to the suburbs to avoid. 

Lots and lots of dysfunctional people come to ER, in fact, they are the bread and butter of the ER.  They are the people who have zero coping skills for one reason or the other.  Their life is one crisis after another and if there isn't a crisis, they will create one.  Expecting them to be organized enough in their own life to have a doctor is unrealistic.  When they come in, they act out all of that dysfunction.

We see some really creepy people in the ER too. Guys who want you to "hold the urinal for them". Sex offenders. People who "just got out of jail". Drunks who are so drunk that they pee and poop themselves. Violent people who want to kill somebody.

Then there are the truly mentally ill. People who hear voices. Manic people. People who try to hurt themselves while they are in the ER. People who get out of control and have to be restrained.  People who sometimes won't hesitate to punch us.

And we see the sad people.  Old people who lay on the floor for hours because they have no family to check on them. Young people who are already messed up because their family is dysfunctional.  Abused people.  Women who are raped.  People who are dying or die.  People who have bad things happen to them just randomly, through no fault of their own, and it will change their lives forever.
People who are terrible junkies or drunks and that's all they will be til it kills them.

This is the real ER.  The one you don't see on TV.

.445, awake and eating a sandwich

What alcohol level is incompatible with life? I guess it depends on your age, your tolerance, your liver function. In ERs we see the worst of the worst chronic drunks. Like the people who are conscious and can eat a sandwich at .445. Unbelieveable. These are the kind of people who never probably go below .20 if they can help it. Every day their goal is .44, however they can get there. These are the people you see at the freeway exits and entrances with the signs about being homeless. I have often wondered, how much can they really be making standing there? Not that much. I mean most people are irritated by them more than anything. But then they probably don't need that much. A cheap bottle of booze probably costs a few dollars. If they're desperate there is always rubbing alcohol. It is just unimagineable to be so addicted to alcohol that you will pour just about anything down your throat that contains alcohol. Its pathetic.

Sometimes I wonder, who could they have been if they hadn't fallen into addiction? I'm sure most of them die at a young age. I would guess a lot die due to violence. Its a rough life out there trying to get that daily bottle. In my state there is no law against public drunkenness. We have 2-3 detox centers. When those are full the drunks come to the local emergency rooms. The county hospital has a specific area for them. All the other ERs just find a room. Thousands and thousands of dollars are spent every year on these people. They aren't the kind of people you are going to help. All you can do is let them sleep it off and stagger out the door to start a new day of searching for that bottle. For the average person, a high level of alcohol in their blood is incompatible with life. Recently a college student in a town about an hour from here found that out the hard way. She died after doing 21 shots on her 21st birthday. The ironic thing is she was a nursing student.