My sarcasm was due to a lot of the questions you’ve asked over the years, some of which were just paranoid in my book. Sorry about that. But, actually, this question is legitimate and I’ve addressed the deterioration of patient care on this site many, many times.
No, I don’t deny that since privatization, statistics are purposely skewed. It has to do with hospital competition that has arisen since privatization. Since MBAs have taken charge of running hospitals, instead of professionals with strong medical backgrounds, the focus has drifted from the patient to the bottom line. America was scammed into trading off their community hospitals for for-profit hospitals and now you see the results.
This is the main reason I retired from nursing.
The focus was no longer on the patient. We never made a decision pertaining to the level of care a patient was to receive based upon the quality of their insurance when I began as a nurse. That was unheard of and would have been considered highly unethical. A patient received the highest level of care available based on their diagnosis. This is no longer true. Times changed and I wouldn’t, so like many nurses from my era, I left.
You people are getting fucked royally with inferior care at a much higher cost. When they privatized, they added another entity that must get paid—the shareholders and investors—and this has significantly driven costs sky high.
Most of the problems of hospital care come due to understaffing, and hospitals understaff now like never before. Labor is expensive. Skilled labor even more so. They must keep the labor costs down to insure the shareholders get paid. Also, younger and inexperienced staff is cheaper than older, experienced staff.
Here’s some stat-skewing for ya: In the last years of my career, I would do a shift on a PCU or an ER to keep my skills up. More often than not, I would take report at the beginning of shift on one floor, then be notified that I was to be transferred to another where I had to take report and sign off again. Sometimes this would happen three times at the start of my shift. This may have happened once or twice in my early years, but it had become SOP by the early 2000’s.
And this is why I, and many other nurses’ shifts begin this way:
Most hospitals, for-profit and not for-profit, receive a minimum of 25% of their annual budget in federal funds with certain strings attached. One of those strings is that every patient must be guaranteed a certain level of care. So, there is a system of compliance and federal monitoring that is supposed to provide that.
This is the system: Every patient is assessed when they are admitted to the hospital and given so many Acuity Points depending on the seriousness of their diagnoses. The amount of all the acuity points added up over a 24 hour period determines the amount of staff the hospital must have on board in order to be in compliance. This can get quite expensive and hospital administrators have found a way to cook the books.
I would take and sign off report on one floor, then be re-assigned to another, then sometimes re-assigned yet again. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being counted in the computer as three nurses on board that shift. This is how the hospitals would keep in federal compliance. Multiply that by many nurses being re-assigned every shift and you have compliance, short-staffing and patients put at risk. Complaints by staff will only get those individuals replaced.
So, there ya go. I agree with you. You’re getting fucked.
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