I dont know of a single nurse who isnt afraid of being fired. - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

I dont know of a single nurse who isnt afraid of being fired. - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Here is a really scary email I got from a nurse in a US hospital. She was kind enough to give me?permission to reprint the email here and you can see my reply below. I would love to hear your ideas on the healthcare industry.? As you may know, hospitals reimbursement for Medicare are in part determined by patient satisfaction.? Management, in turn, has adopted the customer is always right in order to secure positive feedback. As you can imagine, this has not worked. At the same time, nurses are quitting by the truckloads.? Employee morale is at a ridiculously low point and it has been so ongoing that the phrases you hear from nurses are, Well, its better here than anywhere else.? This is particularly concerning since it is seemingly so bad here.? Let me say that the nurses I work with absolutely love taking care of people.? It is the hurdles that are placed in front of us that make the job frustrating. We work at critical staffing levels routinely, are floated to areas we have not been adequately trained, and are given unreasonable patient loads. It is unsafe. A patient died recently and was not on the monitor at the time.? The organizations answer was to have staff sign a book at during the shift stating that the monitor was checked and all patients were on them the reason the patient was off the monitor was because the nurse didnt have time to do it. We were critically staffed and even the charge nurse had a full team with 2/3 other nurses floated from a lower level of care and not trained to take care of this type of patient.? When the house charge nurse informed management that the reason was related to staffing, she was written up. I dont know of a single nurse who isnt afraid of being fired.? Nurses routinely lie about this because to voice it would cost them their job. It would be nice to be able to quit and move to another facility, however, it isnt any different at other facilities.? This problem is prevalent, endemic, and critical. Here is?an example of the culture The hospital policy is for every nurse to take a 30 minute lunch break (its actually the law) If you dont take a lunch you can be written up There is nobody here to relieve you for your lunch Not enough staff on the floor to safely leave for lunch so we all eat at the desk while we work We are not supposed to lift patients.?There are 3 lifts in the entire hospital so we have to lift patients When I informed the wound nurse that the increase in pressure ulcers were from staff being given too many patients to take care of properly and no lifts, I was told that we had plenty of lifts and to use proper body mechanics. I dont know if you have any ideas.but Im hoping that you do. And heres my reply: Thank you so much for your email. I have worked with some Danish hospitals and I see many of the same issues you point to, primarily that budget cuts lead to permanent understaffing. Its terrible. If theres one industry where jobs should be fulfilling and meaningful its healthcare, because there you get to work directly on making patients lives better. But of course, this is impossible when youre not given the resources to do the job well. What happens in that case is that jobs become incredibly stressful and frustrating because employees see that the system is hurting patients instead. Heres what I think hospitals need: A rebellion. Nurses, doctors and other employees need to stand up and protest conditions in some way that management can not overlook. I gave a talk about being a workplace rebel you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU8l4fhcxk0 This will not be easy but neither is the current situation. The obvious question is: What can a group of employees possibly do against a huge entrenched and uncaring system? And the answer is We dont know. Nobody knows what we can do until we do it. I wish I had something more specific to offer but I dont think there are any easy solutions to this situation. What are your thoughts on this? Do you see this going on? What are some ways to solve it? Have you ever encountered a really happy hospital? What did they do differently? Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related