As I sit in ER with my youngest daughter the nurse says “Hospital is full and its so interesting that ever since Covid it seems people get so much sicker now.” more below.
🚔 Crime & ClotShots 💸
She continued on saying how so many patients say they never got this sick before from cold or viruses. Daughter had stroke symptoms (she got first two jabs back in 22.) The neurologist is running multiple test one of which is to test neck blood vessels (?). My guess is for clots. prayers appreciated but shes doing better and all symptoms have gotten better.
There is a shortage of 1 million nurses today.
With an increasing and aging population patients will become even more acute. Hospitals then desperately hire Traveling Nurses that cost more. Majority of these travelers are good but they are not from the community they work in. They stay a few weeks to a few months and onto another assignment. Travel pay is very enticing since it pays more. So even new grads once they pass their nursing exams dream of traveling. It takes years to get an experienced nurse and getting a degree gets one into a job, nothing truly replaces on-the-job experience.
I am a retired RN, but when we used travel nurses, there was little accountability. Their term is 13 week assignments and they can choose to renew, go on to another assignment or take a full time offer from where they were assigned (most don’t want to do that).
This has been my experience as well. The ones I've observed were either incompetent or unethical, because they flagrantly violated patient care rules. Extravasation from IV's placed in tissue rather than the vein with bags of fluid or meds running anyway, and non-patent IV's left in place for over 5 days. There were no consequences for them, which destroyed morale.
Gee ... I wonder why.
All of our more mature nurses are leaving so we have many fresh youngsters that haven’t been on the floor long enough to develop a skill set. It’s sad.