New Nurses Face Reality Shock in Hospital Settings – So What Else is New?

From Jason Pratt, via Flickr

A new report in Nursing Outlook (here’s the abstract) analyzes the experiences of new nurses. The news is not good. Actually, it’s really pretty awful when you think that much of what theses nurses complain about was documented in a book published in 1974 by nurse and researcher Marlene Kramer, Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing.

The current report analyzes the nurses’ answers to an open-ended question that was part of a larger study of newly licensed registered nurses who’ve been employed less than 18 months. Researchers identified five themes among the 612 comments:

• Colliding expectations – The nurses expected the workplace to be more in keeping with what they were taught in nursing school; “high patient-to-nurse ratios were a particularly dominant source of stress.”
• The need for speed – The nurses felt there should have been more time for them to transition to carrying full responsibilities for patient care.
• You want too much – There were many complaints about the heavy workload, with little time to do it and little time to spend with patients.
• How dare you? – The nurses felt they were mistreated by nurse and physician colleagues and management.
• Change is on the horizon – Despite […]

2016-11-21T13:24:48-05:00July 27th, 2009|nursing research, students|17 Comments
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Obama’s Deal with Hospitals – What Does It Mean for Nurses and Patients?

From boliston, via Flickr

On July 8, vice president Joe Biden announced that in striving to gain support for its health reform plan, the White House reached an agreement with the key hospital groups, including the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, and the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

The deal is a quid pro quo deal: according to the AHA Web site, the associations agreed they will not fight $155 billion in cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments, in return for assurances that the cuts are linked to expanded coverage. Additionally, if health reform legislation turns out to include a public insurance plan, then hospitals will receive payments higher than the traditional Medicare and Medicaid rates. The idea is that losses from the reduced payments would be offset by insurance payments from the increased numbers of patients who will be covered. Hospitals will have fewer “pro bono” patients to deal with.

So how will this affect patient care and nursing services? […]

2016-11-21T13:25:15-05:00July 16th, 2009|health care policy, nursing perspective, nursing research, students|0 Comments
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Criminal Nurses: Who’s Looking Out for the Public’s Safety?

Journalists Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber have continued their expose of the California Board of Registered Nursing's (CBRN) delays in investigating and acting on complaints against nurses. The role of this and other state boards is to protect the public from unsafe nurses. Ornstein and Weber show that nurses who are incompetent or engage in criminal activities are able to go from one workplace to another, sometimes harming patients, because the board fails to meet its obligation to the public in a timely fashion.

2016-11-21T13:25:42-05:00July 13th, 2009|nursing research|2 Comments
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What’s It Gonna Take to Improve Nurse Staffing?

From otisarchives4, via Flickr

It’s easy to forget that nurses are the ones who will continue to provide most of the care in whatever health care system we end up with in the coming years. Unfortunately, two recent announcements about how nurses rated staffing and workloads gave me a nasty sense of déjà vu.

On July 6, the American Nurses Association (ANA) announced the results of an online survey it conducted for several months last year: 70% of the 10,000 plus respondents say staffing is insufficient; 52% said they are considering leaving their job (of these, 42% say it’s because of inadequate staffing). Slightly more than 35% say they “rarely or never” are able to take full meal breaks. Over half say the quality of care has declined and almost half (49.5%) are unsure if they’d want someone they care about treated in the facility in which they work. […]

2016-11-21T13:25:43-05:00July 10th, 2009|health care policy, nursing research, safe staffing|2 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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