Nursing Profession Hell

by Lance Murray

The hospital is gathering opinions and the nurses are trying to get a union started. I personally despise unions and don't like their tactics, especially this one. I've witnessed the strikers outside of Walmart, for months on end, walking unproductively up and down the sidewalk doing nothing more creative with their lives than devising new ways to carry a placard without using their hands. They shield their heads from the 108-degree heat with silly hats, and light up one cigarette after another, marching for their cause. I've also watched nurses striking outside of hospitals, a by-product of the cookies and cupcakes that were passed out in exchange for a union card signature. It's the SEIU, which is basically comprised of kitchen workers and janitors for the casinos. Perhaps nurses are a lot like kitchen sluts anyway. People scream at us when we don't have time to bring them a drink of water, and their relatives do the same, treating us like second-class citizens. So we're going to make it a truth and become casino-workers/nurses and join the same union. While "Service Excellence" looks good on paper, a drink of water to satisfy a customer during emergencies takes someone else to help. And the hospitals "patient advocates" give me heartburn as they trot in happy-go-lucky without a clue and rile up the populace with promises then disappear without lending a hand.

The hospital is, of course, amazed and fascinated as to why it should come to this. They distribute flyers, individually addressed to each of us, which detail the hospitals anti-union philosophy. They warn people not to sign union cards because we don't know what we're doing. Must be true. We became nurses.

Well, we know what the hospital is doing. Ever since our new, aged Chief Nurse arrived in the middle of last year, it was determined that we were terribly overstaffed with a ward clerk on our intensive care unit sitting there watching the heart monitors around the clock. That costly situation was fixed. They send her home at 4 in the afternoon now. They feel there are no longer any heart problems after 4. No phones to be answered, no orders to be transcribed, no patients to be transferred in or out of ICU. But night shift gets a ward clerk for the full shift. Even someone outside of health care would lift a brow to this logic.

They decided that our charge nurses should take on a patient assignment in addition to trying to run the unit, make the schedules, run to the codes, and try to move the lesser acute patients out of the ICU, a valuable endeavor that lessens the load on the ER nurses. Charge nurses also help to relieve us for lunch breaks, something completely not understood at my hospital. Or in our state, for that matter. We have two charge nurses left and with 7 days in a week the math doesn't work out.

In response to no-takers for a new charge nurse at an additional ONE dollar per hour, they decided that EVERYBODY should then get the "opportunity" to be a charge nurse whether you liked it or not. Couldn't recruit and staff another charge nurse. Couldn't understand why.

Other hospitals have benefited from recruiting our experienced nurses into their units now. California got a friend of mine last week. She was one of our best nurses.

In a time when California legislated safer nursing ratio's for the public, and Nevada stood out as the state with the worst ratio's in the nation, our hospital is having trouble dealing with the concept of these realities. The hospital is taking away our help, giving us more work, sending us home early, and it's all in the name of "trying to stay competitive" with other hospitals in the area.

They have had record profits for 5 continuous years.

I hate unions. Union representatives came to my door unannounced, no appointment considered, while I was underneath my car bleeding my brakes. They were persistent in their cause and really didn't get the gist of my not wanting to talk to them.

The union cards ask for your social security number and your birth date. This is dangerous information to place on a card and hand back to a "rep" much less than it's not being in a sealed envelope. You are giving strangers your personal financial information. There is a mention of dues that you will allow to be taken out of your check. There is no mention of how much and how often.

I'm mad and upset. Nursing has dealt me a bill of goods and had made pawns out of supposed professionals who absolutely should be worried about critical care medicine, not being sent home early because we have one too many nurses on the unit at one particular time. We do our jobs pretty well and are very autonomous when we don't have to answer the phones and take up the artificially induced slack. A secretary is such a basic concept in any business, and one would think that critical care would be as basic as you could get.

The public should be outraged, as their insurance dollar is not being utilized in their best interests. The length of time you lay on a gurney in ER is directly attributable to the number of nurses staffed upstairs. You are going to lie on a gurney for as long as possible and they'll try to keep you off of the floors. And as long as you don't complain correctly, the hospital will be looking to kick you out while you are bleeding. They'll slow it down first, but you're on your own after that.

Stay out of this "profession" and do something else. Reprint this and distribute it. Make noise. Help me ease my pain and get us more help. You could very well be the beneficiary of safer health care while you're sick in the hospital.

And, if you are another one of those bleeding heart brainwashed nurses who will tell me that I should get out of the business if I don't want to work as a nurse, you are truly part of the problem and indeed one of the pawns. I invested time and money with limited return on investment for the amount of risks associated with nursing. I have been deceived by nursing professors who taught me how to tolerate and deal with insufficient staffing.

Oh screw it. I'm beat. Don't be a nurse.