So there’s this thing in Quebec which I’m sure my Canadian readers have heard of and maybe also a few of my American readers, which involves the Quebec government devising some legislation called the Charter of Quebec Values. I have to say “charters” and “values” are nice happy positive words,
Continue readingTag: Battered Nurse Syndrome
Those Emergency Blues: The phrases junior nurses and most staff do not care to hear from senior nurses…
…or the negativity they can spew…. “You wouldn’t know what to look for in that type of patient assessment anyways…” How do you know I don’t know what to assess for? Are you the textbook I read from? The online periodicals I continue to educate myself with? Are you every
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate the Nurse
An unpleasant, no, ugly and unfortunate situation at Victoria General Hospital is preventing a woman from seeing her son. From the National Post article: A 73-year-old woman who travelled to Victoria from South Africa to care for her seriously ill son has been banned from Victoria General Hospital after she
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: A Nurse Contemplates Leaving the Profession
Dinner last night with an old friend who toils in the mines of Labour and Delivery. She has worked there for four years. She told me of an incident not too long ago working the night shift, faced with a post-partum patient who was bleeding, hypotensive, and tachycardic, in short,
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Fat Nurses Need Not Apply Revisited
More on the Texas hospital, Citizens Medical Center, which banned fat people from being hired. Citizens Medical Center, you might remember, made it policy to exclude new hires with a body mass index >35, and explicitly stated employees appearance should “fit with a representational image or specific mental projection of the
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Fat Nurses Need Not Apply
A Texas hospital has declared war on the scourge of obese nurses: A Victoria [Texas] hospital already embroiled in a discrimination lawsuit filed by doctors of Indian descent has instituted a highly unusual hiring policy: It bans job applicants from employment for being too overweight. The Citizens Medical Center policy, instituted a
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Arizona is Where Educating Patients is Bad, Bad, Bad: An Amanda Trujillo Update
Just a few words about Amanda Trujillo. Jennifer Olin at RNCentral.com has detailed at the latest twists and turns of her case. I won’t repeat everything, but I want to comment instead on the Arizona State Board of Nursing’s latest action. The BoN has added a further charge that Trujillo
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Just Lie Back and Think of Florence — Or Not
Nurse K, possibly the doyenne of nurse bloggers, gives her two cents on Amanda Trujillo. Her advice is to surrender: Yes, I’m going to say it: Forget advocating. Be humble. Be honest and consistent. Go through the process. Listen to your attorney. Your most important asset as a terminated person is an
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Doctors Are From Mars, Nurses Are From — Oh, To Hell With It
News flash! From Fierce Medical News, here’s the shocking headline: Docs, nurses miscommunicate on respect, job role When you guys pick yourselves off the floor from laughing, here’s the money quote: In particular, the survey found differing views of how doctors treat nurses. According to 42 percent of nurse leaders,
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Nurses are Like Howler Monkeys, Poo and All
When I was a young, inexperienced nurse, I quickly learned one lesson: the cliché that Emergency nurses are fabulously assertive, mouthy, in-your-face pitbulls is absolutely true. I don’t mean ED nurses are bitchy or backstabbing eat-their-own-young types, though this was true also, at least for some of them. I mean
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Why Nurses are Furious about the Amanda Trujillo Case
The case of Amanda Trujillo has generated a great deal of passionate commentary across the nursing blogosphere. Trujillo, as you may well know, is the nurse who was fired by Banner Health Del E. Webb Medical Center for requesting multi-disciplinary hospice care case management consult for a pre-transplant patient with end-stage
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: A Little Nurse Bashing to Start Your Day
For breakfast, how about some outrageous libel from physician-blogger Terry Simpson (Twitter: @DocSimpson). File this under how not to blog about a serious issue in health care: The Arizona State Nursing board has asked that this nurse [Amanda Trujillo] undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The board is charged with protecting the
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: What the Amanda Trujillo Case Tells Me About Nurses Behaving Badly
Amanda Trujillo can take cold comfort that her situation is not unique. In the two years and odd months I have posted on this blog, I have written about six other cases where nurses (or nursing students) have been bullied and hounded: the nurse whose hospital fired her for mouthing off
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: The Persecution of Amanda Trujillo
In the ugly, grey world of hospital balance sheets it’s almost a commonplace that physicians generate revenue while nurses represent a cost. Fancy procedures and sub-sub-specialties bring generous income streams, in terms of charging (and profiting) from the provision of a multitude of related services, such as nursing, while nursing
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Karma Sweet Karma
The latest instalment of Nurses Behaving Badly featured the night charge and the day charge (i.e. me) getting a status asthmaticus organized in Resus 1 a few minutes after shift change. It’s probably reasonable to wonder why the two Resus Room nurses weren’t attending (and attentive to) the situation, especially after we
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Under Construction
Meaning me, of course. I worked a (rare) Night 12 a few days ago. It was the usual dog’s breakfast of high acuity, walking wounded without end lining up at Triage, and the particular Emergency Department hell of having no beds for, you know, emergency patients, the department being a
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Sometimes Things Ain’t What They Seem
Niagara Health is taking a beat down lately. First it was an uncontrolled C. difficile outbreak, then a provincial administrator was appointed to deal with the outbreak, and now this: When Doreen Wallace fell and broke her hip in the lobby of a Niagara Falls hospital, she figured at least she’d get help — and fast. But […]
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: Andrea Horwath has a Complaint about the Health Care System.
For my American friends and readers, we’re having a provincial election here in Ontario. Since health care is deemed a provincial responsibility (though funded extensively by the federal government), it’s naturally a hot topic of discussion. At the televised leader’s debate a couple of days ago, New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath managed to step in […]
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: O Why O Why Did I Pick Up The Phone?
Phone rings. I look around. There is no ward clerk in sight. Damn. I answer. “Emergency, Charge Nurse.” “Can I ask you a question?” The voice on the other end sounds flat and tired. “Sure,” I say warily. “I came to see you guys a three days ago and I had a sore chest and […]
Continue readingThose Emergency Blues: In Which TorontoEmerg Discourses on Some Aspects of Human Nature
It’s probably more than little trite to say the Emergency Department is a microcosm or laboratory of humanity, but like most clichés it has an element of truth. We see all types in the ED, the good, the ugly, and the purely despicable. (And then I could talk about the patients.) We’re human, after all. But in […]
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