This case study is a truly agonizing look at how care goes wrong in America's nursing homes; the article also provides an in-depth ethical analysis of the dilemmas confronted by nurses who work in nursing homes with substandard care.
If you want to know what the ICU of the future will be like, think of an extremely ill patient connected to myriad tubes and monitors; watched by cameras; every sigh, snore, or change in breath sound picked up by an audio feed.
Then remove the patient, leaving just monitors, speakers, and video screens. […]
Asked what the major issues in health care reporting are right now, Schwitzer said that, after analyzing 780 stories from the major newspapers and networks that feed Americans their news on health care, he and his colleagues have found that "72% of stories fail to adequately address costs." "71% fail to adequately quantify benefits."
According to a useful overview by the Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, nurses, insurers, and others are fighting to be included in the health care reform debate. We know the insurers can take care of themselves, so let’s focus on the nurses:
Hundreds of nurses last week rallied on Capitol Hill in an attempt to have their voices and opinions on health care reform heard and included as lawmakers begin to draft legislation, Roll Call reports. The rally included the California Nurses Association – National Nurses Organizing Committee, the American Academy of Nursing, the American Nurses Association and the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. According to Roll Call, some of the groups disagree on the details of reform, including whether reform should include a single-payer system, but are united in their effort to be included in discussions on overhaul legislation. Michelle Artz, a lobbyist for ANA, said, “We want to make sure this isn’t a physician-centric dialogue” (Ackley, Roll Call, 5/18).
As far as I know, the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) wasn’t actually present at that rally. But what matters is that there is growing recognition that effective health care reform will not happen without the involvement of nurses. The AAN […]
By wonker, via Flickr.
According to a story in The Australian, the drug company Merck has been accused of paying nurses to sift through patient medical records in search of potential candidates for the drug Vioxx. Here’s what nurse ethicist Douglas Olsen, who recently wrote a two-part article (here’s part one; part two is here) for AJN on nurses and the pharmaceutical industry, wrote to us about the story:
The news report demonstrates the public’s visceral sense that the Merck program in Australia was unethical. Nurses, as well as doctors and pharmacists, can anticipate righteous indignation whenever their clinical deliberations appear compromised by a company’s desire to sell a particular drug. […]