Family, not nurses, care for patients
Many groups have out-priced or out-educated themselves, causing loss of jobs, and nursing seems to be another.
While Doris Grinspun, CEO of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, complains about the loss of registered nurses jobs, I (as an RN for 45 years) see that as a good thing.
I moved to Toronto 17 years ago and worked for 14 of those years for a homecare company, only to learn that nurses in hospitals don’t do nursing care anymore. They primarily mind computers and create marvellous, detailed and technical nursing care plans that are needed to protect against liability in our litigious society, while there is no one to care for the patient.
The family is supposed to do that.
I often went to large, toprated hospitals to do private nursing for my homecare clients who were hospitalized, when families could not be there 24 hours a day. It wasn’t the wealthy who privately hired nurses willing to go to the hospitals, it was the exhausted and desperate.
A 14-year-old disabled girl having a tracheotomy told me that, because the nurses never answered a call bell, she always had the door left open and a supply of cups and dishes that she could throw into the hall to hopefully attract the attention of a visitor who would go for help.
No one needs to pity the RNs who should be renamed some kind of technician, as the public doesn’t understand nurses who don’t care for patients. Evelyn Shreve, Comber
Nurses need time to do their jobs
Throughout history, it was nurses who were there for victims of horrible epidemics, catastrophic natural disasters, saved the lives of countless soldiers and gave comfort to those who paid the ultimate price to protect the freedom of others in their final hours of life.
Our nurses of today still carry on the tradition of caring for patients in need. These modern-day Florence Nightingales do so under very difficult conditions.
An inept Ministry of Health and grossly overpaid hospital bureaucrats have created a fiscal-first, patients-last policy that has nurses run off their feet. They spend one hour per shift doing hard copy paperwork, taking time away from patients and leaving a carbon footprint bigger than the Grand Canyon.
Registered nurses are being phased out in favour of the less-studied cheaper registered practical nurses. The schedules are full with parttimers to avoid having to pay benefits.
The reason I’m aware of these facts is that I have been hospitalized for the past one and a half years in well-run institutions with great nurse morale and the polar opposite.
These are just a few of the horror stories going on in our health-care system, and there are many, many more.
Kudos to all of our fabulous RNs and RPNs, and shame on those who continue to degrade and disrespect this very noble profession. Kim Kelly, Windsor