...to point out counterexamples to any proposition, no matter how far flung, irrelevant, or inappropriate.

First off, when I worked as an EMT in this county (1999 through 2001) I found the nurses at St Pete's (particularly in the ER) to be absolutely fantastic.  The ER nurses were very hard working, and even with the stress of an over-run ER they took the time to listen and get the best information from the EMT's, paramedics, and the patients themselves.  On interfacility transports from other floors at St Pete's, I often found that the nurses had a very strong rapport with their patients, did very thorough work, and carefully communicated all the important information on the patients.  This was not my experience at many other hospitals, and was very different from my experiences with a whole lot of nursing homes and private clinics (and do I have some horror stories).  Nurses at St Peter's deserve the best, because that's what they give.

I must also stress that, in my experience, there is no such thing as a good health care company.  There are outstanding health care workers, and there are hospitals etc that are filled with outstanding workers, but the leadership and policies of health care companies are terrible.  For-profit companies (like the ambulance company I worked for) are very clear that money is the bottom line, and the bottom line all too often is sought at the expense of patient care and employee satisfaction.  And non-profits, for some reason, have largely decided to follow the for-profit models of doing business.  Thus the conflict at St. Peter's.

No health care worker (or really any worker for that matter) should be without a union.  Unions ensure that the interests of workers are met, and typically the interests of health care workers are to offer the best in patient care.  Thanks to the PSPH nurses for their hard organizing work!

The Canaanite's Call

I'm getting a little tired of the squabbling here.  Rick, your general reaction to Norm both on this thread and in general seems to be getting pretty personal.  I don't agree with Norm here, but I think it is important that he be allowed to disagree and dissent.

Olyblog is a great forum for organizing.  But I think it is more important that Olyblog be a great site for citizen journalism and a forum for discussion.  This requires openness and a finely tuned willingness to listen and engage with diverse ideas.  Sometimes the need for a "unified message", or to suppress dissent, in an organizing drive will conflict with the needs of open discourse.  Yet the needs of discourse must take higher priority on this site if it has any claim to "citizen journalism".

The Canaanite's Call

I am incredibly hyper right now, it being Friday and I’ve had 2 energy drinks in the last 3 hours. So I am intentionally slowing down and trying to give a clear and honest response. I read your thoughts this morning, and wanted to let it digest for awhile so I chose to start writing this response later in the day.

First, I’d like to again say that you could not pay me enough to be an RN, LPN, PCP, CNA or any other acronym that involves nursing care. I could not hold myself to the level of empathy and compassion that a good nurse holds themselves to.

Second, I feel I may have worded parts of my initial response badly. I in no way feel that RN’s are a bunch of lazy people. This is not what I was trying to convey and I don’t want it to seem that way. I think the majority of nurses I have worked with have been above par in all areas, and a good number of them to be excellent.

With both of those points in mind, there are still some problems with nursing staff, and some of those problems have been around for awhile. I think you would agree with me considering some of your statements: “What I found there was a setting in which, for the most part, the employees were genuinely united…Of course there are variations from one unit or shift to another…..there were definitely pockets of work groups where this was less true....There are always exceptions, and those exceptions occur within each work title or category house-wide.

The entire time that I have worked here there has been an ongoing joke (which isn’t really funny, but humorous in a sad way) that if we were ever admitted to the hospital and couldn’t communicate, that we would want our coworkers to make sure we were placed in a “good” unit. At one point we actually had a list that we kept the unit/floors that we would not allow ourselves to be placed on if we were to become ill. We were going to make copies and make sure they were taped to the front of our charts. Sad huh? It wasn’t just myself, or one other coworker, it was a group of us. Being that you have worked on most of the units I’m sure that you have noticed the level of care can be very different in different units, on different shifts, with different nursing staff. Have you noticed this? If so can you deny this?

On more than one occasion I’ve seen patients in states that should be illegal and have wanted to write-up the nursing staff involved only to have coworkers say, “It’s been like that for forever, don’t even bother.” The times when I’ve called it to the attention of a supervisor they end up taking it to their supervisor and it just dwindles away, as if it never really happened. I’m not saying this is a common occurrence, but it happened often enough that I felt a little ashamed of the place that I work at. When the offending staff repeatedly did the same thing over and over again, and continued to have employment there, it was a little depressing. Does this seem right to you? Would you send a friend or family member to the hospital knowing that they may end up with nursing staff like that?

Maybe it was all a financial move. In my heart though I think administration didn’t want to fire any RN’s for fear of looking bad and the plan to fire the PCP’s seemed like it would solve a financial problem (I think they were wrong in this regard) and also make the “problem nurses” have to be accountable for patient care. I also believe that the move was geared towards there being more “licensed” staff doing patient care…yet another move that I think was not only unnecessary but not very well thought out.

I don’t want to get any longer winded than I have to be, but I do want to answer some of the questions/thoughts you had.

Norm doesn't say what his job is, but indicates that he is neither an RN, an LPN, nor a PCP.

That’s correct, I didn’t. You, having worked there so long, probably know that males are in the minority. If I said what my title was I would leave very little doubt as to who I am. You being anonymous can surely understand that. Rest assured, working at St. Pete’s for as long you have, in so many units, we have run into each other before.

Without knowing much about an RN's duties it is quite possible for an onlooker to see a nurse on the phone or sitting at the desk or out-of-sight in the medication room and not understand that being somewhere other than the bedside does not mean she/he is not taking care of patients.

Notice I didn’t mention the nursing staff being out of sight or being on the phone. When you have 2 RN’s sitting at the front desk reading cosmo and looking at floor-plans online for the house they want to build, it’s hard to imagine them concentrating on patient care. Seeing it occasionally would make me think they were on a break. Seeing it throughout the shift over 8 hours makes me think something else. How about you?

I will conclude by happily pointing out that Norm himself is rare exception. He represents a severe contradiction to the mutually supportive environment I've experienced amongst employees at St. Peter.

Huh? Now you are assuming that I present myself this way in front of my patients? I am not a nurse, yet I have helped comfort patients who were puking, wiped the behinds of patients who couldn’t do so themselves, helped nurses clean up their patients (for those who can’t get out of bed to use the bathroom), heck I’ve even helped insert an NG tube (I had to go puke afterwards). I’ve had nurses who were so busy they couldn’t wheel a patient out after discharge and had nobody to help, so I’ve helped there. I’ve restrained patients that wanted nothing more to take a swipe at their nurse. I’ve been pee’d on, poo’d on, scratched, kicked, slapped, punched and puked on all in my time working at St. Pete’s. All to help out other people, including nursing staff. I’ve responded to white teams where they had become so desperate that they were asking for “all males” to respond. I’ve run over to 1south to help nursing out when things got hectic. I’ve cheered up nurses who thought they were going to lose their jobs, I’ve tried to cheer up nurses who were heart-broken having to tell family that their loved-one had passed away. I have been nothing but supportive to my coworkers, even the ones that I didn’t always agree with.

There are plenty of disgruntled employees at St. Peter these days, but until I encountered Norm on Olyblog, I can honestly say I could never have imagined any fellow employee who would publicly and so unfairly excoriate a group of co-workers in the manner he did – especially during that group's contract negotiation.

I’m actually pretty happy with my work environment. I work with a small number of nurses and they are all great. MOST of the nurses I have worked with in my time at St. Pete’s have been great. There have been those who I had a hard time accepting their behavior. This is the first time, publicly, I have ever talked about some of the problems I have seen at the hospital. I’m not the only one who wants to though, I just feel vocal enough to talk about the other side. There are others like me out there, and some of them are nurses. A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, if the weak links are allowed to stay what does that say for the organization?

I cannot imagine how this would affect contract negotiations. If you truly believe that this would affect the negotiations send me a message and I’ll repost them after the negotiation is over.

FYI I still believe that it is asinine to have staff, who are not on the floors/units, deciding which floors/units can take more patients and which floors can’t. I feel this should be left to the charge nurse. I’ve seen more than one charge nurse lose her composure from having admitting tell her that they were taking 2 more patients, and staffing telling her that she can’t get more staff.

Norm,

Throughout this thread I have greatly appreciated Rick's attempts to question the purpose or point of your comments. I haven't figured out the answer but I have decided that for me there is absolutely no point in engaging with you.

-the St. Peter nurse