They have badge attachments now that beep and tell your supervisor if they don’t sense a nurse washing their hands or using hand sanitizer when they enter a room. I get the idea for how this could lower infection rates in hospitals but I wonder if maybe it’s not just more humane to just hire more nurses and encourage us to take time to do things correctly instead of essentially fitting us with a shock collar that does everything but the actual shock.
They’re doing shit like this and people still ask why they have to put up nets to catch people jumping off the parking garage like it’s some kind of mystery.
They also have little wand sensors that you have to go into a room and put up to a receiver for psychiatry to ensure we’re actually physically going into all patient rooms every fifteen minutes 24/7 even while they’re sleeping to make sure they’re not hanging themselves in there. Honestly sometimes it feels like we’re just making sure they want to hang themselves by the time they leave.
Ok, so I get the “good intentions” of the procedures - sanitary, patient health and wellbeing, etc - sounds good on paper. It yeah, you’re right that it’s demoralizing and easily causes burnout. I’ve had jobs where management absolutely didn’t trust their employees to do the right thing. They even went so far as to herd us into a janitors closet and then walk us to our desks (floating desk arrangements at a call center) like we were children.
The managers were told to walk up and down the rows and look for people not doing their job and fire them. We were told if we weren’t on active calls, we were to sit in our chairs with our hands over the keyboard in ready position for the next call. No talking; no reading books; no nothing. I’m sure somewhere on paper it sounded like a good idea. But it was the absolute most toxic environment I’ve personally been in.
Right now we’re just trying to keep the ANA from making functionally illegal to go on strike in the first place by making it our fault for “patient abandonment” if the hospital doesn’t hire (usually extremely expensive) travel nurses to cover strikes.
The way strikes work for nurses is that hospitals are essential to a community, so you have to give notice, then the hospital has to find temps to cover (again, I’m fine with this, I don’t consider them scabs, their wages alone are punishing the hospital, but this is also why they shouldn’t be capping travel salaries). The issue is they’re trying to make it so that it’s the responsibility of the nurses going on strike to find that coverage, or they get charged with abandoning the patients. They’re literally just trying to make it functionally illegal to even go on strike without ever saying those exact words.
They’re taking comments right now, let me find the link.Here’s the r/nursing post that person said it all better (I’ve been trying to get more hcw communities going over here but it’s slow going and feels like it’s only me sometimes. Here is a sample comment (but it’s written from a nurse perspective, it may need to be shuffled around into “concerned citizen” language) and here is the direct link to the survey. If one of you wants to draft a solid “concerned citizen statement” I’ll add that too.
Could also make a good post on c/medicine or c/antiwork but idk I’m still waking up and have a lot of unpacking from the move still to do this weekend. But it may actually help them to know people outside the Healthcare sector are starting to notice their bullshit. Or that Healthcare CEO money will still be too good, idk.
Fucking tech solutions to a manager problem. The manager should care about the metrics of wait time and client satisfaction.
If waits are low and satisfaction is high. Then who gives fuck all about what techs do in between calls.
Metrics like calls per tech or average length of calls could be used to better understand tech efficiency. Or even rings before pickup. A good pbx can help ensure calls are relatively equally spread between techs. This helps keep one tech from over working for another slacking off. You can have utilization goals so that you aren’t under or over staffed (I’m of the opinion that a techs utilization should be roughly 75-80% and they should have downtime in their shifts to prevent burnout.)
It’s stupid, inhumane, and impossible to expect an employee to track, bill, and work 100% of their shift.
I lost the only job I have ever left involuntarily on a helpdesk for a small system partly because of the tracking tools they used
I was top in the team by tickets closed. The person they kept was top by time per call (spent the longest time on each call/worst at efficiently fixing callers’ issues)
Tech tools are not a solution for incompetent management
Stuff like this is the expansion of the state the Lenin railed so strongly against.
Why not just have the beeper let the nurse know? Do you think the nurses aren’t washing their hands intentionally? Only report it if they’re like, constantly not doing it! The goal here is surveillance and punishment not improved sanitation
As a healthcare worker, the nurses are absolutely not washing their hands intentionally. You’d be surprised how many healthcare workers don’t believe in science based medicine.
Actually it is. There’s not actually a nursing shortage if you look into the numbers, there’s just a shortage of nurses willing to get screamed at by delirious people while doing backbreaking work without backup or enough people to distribute that work among while getting paid pennies. If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around. It always comes down to pay and ratios (which are inextricably intertwined) and everything else is fractions of percentages of the problem that get overemphasized so that the people siphoning money out of this system never have to address the elephant in the room. Don’t let them deflect you away from focusing on their greed. A bunch of nurses are also out there pushing themselves through degree mill nurse-practitioner schools to become wildly unsafe prescribers for the same reasons as those leaving entirely, which also reduces the bedside workforce.
If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around
I think both can be true.
From expenses point of view, Isn’t under-staffing almost the same thing as low pay? What’s preventing hospital administrators from hiring more nurses? If it’s just money, then I don’t think the complaint of under-staffing all that different from the complaint of low pay; I suspect it’s even affected by sort of preference (some nurses would prefer working more for better pay, others would prefer sharing the workload.)
Of course from administration / governance point of view it boils down to money, what I’m saying is that I find it unlikely is that it’s “just hire more nurses”. It’s also doctors, other staff, etc. It’s more likely the whole system.
They have badge attachments now that beep and tell your supervisor if they don’t sense a nurse washing their hands or using hand sanitizer when they enter a room. I get the idea for how this could lower infection rates in hospitals but I wonder if maybe it’s not just more humane to just hire more nurses and encourage us to take time to do things correctly instead of essentially fitting us with a shock collar that does everything but the actual shock.
They’re doing shit like this and people still ask why they have to put up nets to catch people jumping off the parking garage like it’s some kind of mystery.
They also have little wand sensors that you have to go into a room and put up to a receiver for psychiatry to ensure we’re actually physically going into all patient rooms every fifteen minutes 24/7 even while they’re sleeping to make sure they’re not hanging themselves in there. Honestly sometimes it feels like we’re just making sure they want to hang themselves by the time they leave.
Ok, so I get the “good intentions” of the procedures - sanitary, patient health and wellbeing, etc - sounds good on paper. It yeah, you’re right that it’s demoralizing and easily causes burnout. I’ve had jobs where management absolutely didn’t trust their employees to do the right thing. They even went so far as to herd us into a janitors closet and then walk us to our desks (floating desk arrangements at a call center) like we were children.
The managers were told to walk up and down the rows and look for people not doing their job and fire them. We were told if we weren’t on active calls, we were to sit in our chairs with our hands over the keyboard in ready position for the next call. No talking; no reading books; no nothing. I’m sure somewhere on paper it sounded like a good idea. But it was the absolute most toxic environment I’ve personally been in.
Anyway, y’all should unionize.
Right now we’re just trying to keep the ANA from making functionally illegal to go on strike in the first place by making it our fault for “patient abandonment” if the hospital doesn’t hire (usually extremely expensive) travel nurses to cover strikes.
The way strikes work for nurses is that hospitals are essential to a community, so you have to give notice, then the hospital has to find temps to cover (again, I’m fine with this, I don’t consider them scabs, their wages alone are punishing the hospital, but this is also why they shouldn’t be capping travel salaries). The issue is they’re trying to make it so that it’s the responsibility of the nurses going on strike to find that coverage, or they get charged with abandoning the patients. They’re literally just trying to make it functionally illegal to even go on strike without ever saying those exact words.
They’re taking comments right now,
let me find the link.Here’s the r/nursing post that person said it all better (I’ve been trying to get more hcw communities going over here but it’s slow going and feels like it’s only me sometimes. Here is a sample comment (but it’s written from a nurse perspective, it may need to be shuffled around into “concerned citizen” language) and here is the direct link to the survey. If one of you wants to draft a solid “concerned citizen statement” I’ll add that too.Could also make a good post on c/medicine or c/antiwork but idk I’m still waking up and have a lot of unpacking from the move still to do this weekend. But it may actually help them to know people outside the Healthcare sector are starting to notice their bullshit. Or that Healthcare CEO money will still be too good, idk.
Fucking tech solutions to a manager problem. The manager should care about the metrics of wait time and client satisfaction.
If waits are low and satisfaction is high. Then who gives fuck all about what techs do in between calls.
Metrics like calls per tech or average length of calls could be used to better understand tech efficiency. Or even rings before pickup. A good pbx can help ensure calls are relatively equally spread between techs. This helps keep one tech from over working for another slacking off. You can have utilization goals so that you aren’t under or over staffed (I’m of the opinion that a techs utilization should be roughly 75-80% and they should have downtime in their shifts to prevent burnout.)
It’s stupid, inhumane, and impossible to expect an employee to track, bill, and work 100% of their shift.
I lost the only job I have ever left involuntarily on a helpdesk for a small system partly because of the tracking tools they used
I was top in the team by tickets closed. The person they kept was top by time per call (spent the longest time on each call/worst at efficiently fixing callers’ issues)
Tech tools are not a solution for incompetent management
I bet scam call center have a better working environment that this.
Stuff like this is the expansion of the state the Lenin railed so strongly against.
Why not just have the beeper let the nurse know? Do you think the nurses aren’t washing their hands intentionally? Only report it if they’re like, constantly not doing it! The goal here is surveillance and punishment not improved sanitation
As a healthcare worker, the nurses are absolutely not washing their hands intentionally. You’d be surprised how many healthcare workers don’t believe in science based medicine.
Look, I get your point, but it’s not like nurses grow on trees. (Especially good nurses.)
Things need fixing, but they need fixing far earlier than that.
Actually it is. There’s not actually a nursing shortage if you look into the numbers, there’s just a shortage of nurses willing to get screamed at by delirious people while doing backbreaking work without backup or enough people to distribute that work among while getting paid pennies. If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around. It always comes down to pay and ratios (which are inextricably intertwined) and everything else is fractions of percentages of the problem that get overemphasized so that the people siphoning money out of this system never have to address the elephant in the room. Don’t let them deflect you away from focusing on their greed. A bunch of nurses are also out there pushing themselves through degree mill nurse-practitioner schools to become wildly unsafe prescribers for the same reasons as those leaving entirely, which also reduces the bedside workforce.
I think both can be true.
From expenses point of view, Isn’t under-staffing almost the same thing as low pay? What’s preventing hospital administrators from hiring more nurses? If it’s just money, then I don’t think the complaint of under-staffing all that different from the complaint of low pay; I suspect it’s even affected by sort of preference (some nurses would prefer working more for better pay, others would prefer sharing the workload.)
Of course from administration / governance point of view it boils down to money, what I’m saying is that I find it unlikely is that it’s “just hire more nurses”. It’s also doctors, other staff, etc. It’s more likely the whole system.