Hospital Bosses Kill Patient To Prove A Point

[Modern School]

A patient died at Alta Bates Sutter Medical Center in Oakland on Saturday due to an error by a scab nurse.

One might be inclined to blame the California Nurses Association (CNA), which was on strike against the hospital, except that the nurses had only engaged in a one-day strike on Thursday. When they returned to work on Friday, they found the hospital’s entrances blocked by armed guards, according to the Left Labor Reporter. They had been locked out and replaced by poorly trained scabs, one of whom accidentally killed the patient on Saturday.

The hospital, which is demanding 200 concessions from its nurses, thought they might be able to bully the nurses into accepting their demands by temporarily locking them out. Their stupid tactic not only showed an utter lack of regard for their employees, but an even greater disregard for their patients. CNA members even warned the hospital that it was unsafe to hire the scabs, as they lacked the training and experience to do the job safely.

Some of the hospital’s demands will increase nurses’ caseloads and decrease their ability to advocate for patients, both of which will undermine patient safety, security and ability to heal quickly. The incident on Saturday is a harbinger of the implications of these policies.

The CNA is calling the lockout punitive. While Sutter claims that their temp agency would only provide scabs on five-day contracts, other local hospitals that were also affected by the one-day strike on Thursday did not lock out their nurses. As of yesterday, the Sutter nurses were still locked out.

Even if the nurses had not been locked out, but had been off the job because of a planned strike, the blame for any injuries or deaths to patients would still belong to the hospital executives. First, it is unreasonable for workers in the helping professions to allow themselves to be blackmailed and intimidated into accepting low pay or terrible working conditions by accusing them of not caring about their clients. A similar type of bullying is commonly used against teachers, too. If this tactic were consistently allowed to succeed, then nurses’ and teachers’ working conditions could deteriorate to 16-hour days for minimum wage.

However, it is not just a tactical impracticality to accept the bosses’ accusations that striking workers are to blame for workplace mishaps and declining services. The bosses’ attempts to weaken job security, lower pay and benefits, increase hours and workloads, and stifle free speech in the workplace all jeopardize client safety and the quality of services workers are able to provide.

Declining pay, for example, results in higher attrition and greater difficulty hiring and retaining quality employees in the first place, both of which result in deteriorating quality of service. Increased hours and greater workplace demands not only stress workers physically and emotionally, increasing the chances of accidents, but they also stretch workers thin, decreasing response times during crises. Attacks on job security and speech hamper the ability and willingness of employees to advocate for clients, decreasing the likelihood that their needs will be met.

Hence, strikes by nurses, teachers and others in the “helping” fields, are not only about protecting employees’ income and working conditions, but about improving the conditions and services for the employees’ clients such as patients and students.

Modern School
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/09/hospital-bosses-kill-patient-to-prove.html

[patrice]

1. Almost no one in medicine knows better than nurses how much care is NOT a one-size-fits-all

proposition.

My family has seen 8 of us off into the hereafter, up close and personal, in the last 15 years. The nurses and the CNAs are the heart and soul of America's "health" "care" institutions.

HIGHLY specific non-template information about that individual person receiving care is what nursing professionalism is ALL about. Especially amongst the elderly, little things can make very very big differences!

[TwilightGardener]

2. Traveling and temp nurses are RN's, same license. All nurses within

a state are held to the same standards of practice. And mistakes happen even with nurses who work in the same unit day in and day out. I think both management and the striking nurses need to stop using this issue.

[ThatPoetGuy]

3. So a temp nurse walks through the door without needing to learn anything?

The nurse doesn't need to learn any signatory systems, locations of medical equipment and medicines, means of accessing doctors and hospital staff?

Or even know their way around?

No, I guess an RN is an RN.

[TwilightGardener]

10. Temp nurses take new assignments all the time. I've worked with many

temps, traveling nurses, and floaters. I've had to float to different and unfamiliar areas of my hospital. It happens. It's not ideal, but that's what PRN, travel, and temp work consists of.

[patrice]

21. So all different kinds of things can be reported in one way - or - all the same kinds of things can

be reported in a bunch of different ways.

Depending upon what is needed by the machine.

[3waygeek]

4. A California RN called into Thom Hartmann's show today...

and said that, unlike in other states, there are a lot of foreign-born nurses in CA, as the state makes it easy for them to get licensed. Many of these foreign nurses studied at non-accredited schools and had limited English skills.

I've no idea if she's right or not -- I haven't lived in California for almost 20 years, and when I did live there, I had almost no contact with nurses, as I was much younger & healthier then.

[eilen]

6. Boy, I don't even know what to say to this statement.

It's similar along the lines of my old CEO saying we should just hire the AA laid off stewardesses as nurses. Nurses may all sit for the same exam to be licensed but it is like saying all attorneys are the same, heck they all sit for the same Bar exam -- so what if a lawyer is a tax attorney, we'll hire him to defend someone in a criminal case. Different states have different standards of practice as well. Yes there are mistakes that happen, but with a well trained staff and a good safety policy, they are minimized. Mistakes usually happen when the nurse is over worked, has too many patients and overwhelmed.

I find the expectations and assumptions of the public at large to be ridiculous sometimes.

[TwilightGardener]

9. Who is the "public at large" you refer to?

[patrice]

7. IOW, individual person has no value, differences in temperament, intelligence, skill, knowledge=0

You just proved that we do not live in a meritocracy. The whole thing is a machine and we are its completely interchangeable parts, the opposite of what our founders said America is.

[TwilightGardener]

11. That has little bearing on this particular issue. It could be that the temp RN

in question was a fuckup, or it could be that mistakes happen, and coincidentally this was the day for it. Unique knowledge, skill and talent in any given area is great but we're talking minimum standards for a nurse to be safe in a given setting. They all have to meet the same standards for licensure, and maintain continuing education and work experience hours. You should expect any RN who takes care of you, whether a temp, a floater, or a full-time permanent staffer, to be able to meet minimum standards in terms of SAFE practice. And they generally won't take a burn nurse and put her in, let's say, NICU. That would be a license-risking assignment that most nurses would not accept. I think it's bad for either side in this dispute to point to this poor patient's death for bolstering an argument.

[patrice]

14. Correction: "That POSSIBLY has little bearing ..." & your absolute decision that it doesn't is evide

nce of bias. It might and it might not.

[patrice]

16. & The difference between "might & might not" can be VERY big to individual PERSONS needing care, but

[patrice]

17. ...but it's only money to "health" "care", completely fungible digits in PRIVATE machines.

[patrice]

15. You are also assuming the minimum standards are valid standards, i.e. what can & should be done.

[msongs]

5. non-"scab" nurses kill patients as well. so much for the OP point of view nt

[patrice]

8. So dismissive. Kind of paternalistic don't you think? Think? I guess not, otherwise this False Equiv

alency would be odious to a mind that would assess at least potential value to the differences in the knowledge bases represented in this kind of situation: one with little more than abstractions documented by records vs. the other which contains those abstraction PLUS a more longitudinal, direct, and wholistic experience of the subject in question, i.e. those in their care.

[Warpy]

12. YES! Somebody else got it!

Even though they'll hang the scab nurse who was completely in over her head out to dry, Sutter is the real reason that patient died.

Adequate and consistent staffing is the biggest predictor of good patient outcomes. The death rate goes up significantly for every patient a nurse is assigned above the level of 4-6, depending on the specialty.

They know that, yet they're trying to cut costs and increase profits on the backs of staff, nurses first.

[patrice]

19. They can also control the actual standards of care by means of at-will employment. nt

[patrice]

20. "actual" as opposed to whatever the machine SAYS it is doing.

[Odin2005]

13. Scabs are FUCKING EVIL class traitors! Fuck all of them!

[patrice]

18. It stands to reason that dependence on that level of "skill" would reduce standards of care to

the lowest common denominator.

When everything is run solely on numbers, qualities suffer, because there is a difference in how people do things and those differences matter, that is, unless you are a machine.

People's actions have different qualities. If they didn't, for example, all notes in patient records would be exactly identical. Everyone would change a dressing precisely the same. All tones of voice would be identical and bring about identical effect. How one moves in close proximity to another person would never be significant . . . .

Bean counters!!! :puke:


*rhetorical "you", of course.