Your at the hospital. Your loved one is in room 210. You notice your loved one is in pain. Since they are unable to push the call light for the nurse due to their condition, you reach over and push the button. And you wait....and wait...and wait. Ok its only been 15 minutes. Hospitals are busy places. 20 minutes later you are little peeved but keep waiting patiently. Maybe the little woman down the hall you met earlier that could not breathe needs all the nurses attention right now. Ok 40 minutes. This is nuts! You march to the nurses station, no ones there, alot of other call lights are lit up and ringing at the station. You look around, you walk the hall, theres the little old woman who can't breathe, she yells at you asking for you to please send her a nurse, she is having trouble breathing. You pass other family members in the hall, they are also looking for the nurse. What now? As you look down the corridor you ask yourself what is going on here? Wheres the docter he was just here, he prescribed the new pain medication, it would be better he had said. As you pass by the nurses station you see your loved ones open chart. There sits the presription the docter wrote, the words he wrote in the chart:"Doing much better, continue with current treatment, monitor vital signs hourly, may discharge in two days." You think yeah,"monitor vital signs we can't even get a pain pill".
Ok, so I made that up! No one ever thinks of how important a nurse is to our communities, hospitals, nursing homes, until they need one! Then we get into the hospitals, nursing homes with our parents and children and tell our friends and family how bad the hospital was, how lazy the nurses are because it took them 15 minutes to take mom/dad to the bathroom.Until the public is aware of the situations that nurses are faced with the scene I described above will maybe become fact. So think about it very hard what are we going to do if the nursing shortage continues and the good nurses continue to get out of the profession. Can you start your own I.V.? You might have to. In most states it is against the law for nurses to strike, to walk off the job. It is considered abandonment and you could be prosocuted by law for neglect not to mention lose your nurses license. (I am not sure on the exact laws, this is just what I have been told by other nurses and nursing instructors, if anyone knows the laws please email me I would like to see them)So what choices does a nurse have? They can etheir suck it up and take it or quit nursing. Some places have unions, most don't. Its sad that a company can run nursing homes and hospitals, anyway they want, they can treat staff anyway they want, there are no unions to stand up for us.
This is not right. Please pass this page along. Help me to help make the public aware of the critical nursing shortage before it is too late. If only the public would rally around nurses like they do teacher shortages, police shortages, the profession could become better, Teachers are responsible for our children,police for our protection, Nurses are responsible for people who are usually at a low point in their life. By the way, teachers have unions and they can and do strike.(No offense to teachers who also work long hours with little appreciation, without teachers there wouldn't be nurses!)
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