Authentic Nursing
This was an older story that I had to just comment on. It is a testament to caring. Today’s nurses WANT to do the same thing. They want the time that this nurse had. Berger was 21 and just out of college when she worked in the pediatric recovery room at the medical center. The baby was a burn victim. The story is beautiful. Today’s nurses have too much bureaucratic drag to get through before they can do what they went to school for. Their path parallels ours as doctors. Now, these nurses have to check boxes, run after alarms, and are spread too thin to find themselves in the position of nurse Berger. I bet almost every nurse who saw this was a little jealous. That may be the saddest part of this story.
Amen Doug! When I hear friends, family, etc bitch about their hospital stays, and how they never could get help with this or that, that they had to wait forever for disccharge, or how there was some old person across the hall yelling over and over and seemed to be abandoned, I tell them …
…Hold up, wait just a second. The nurses aren’t lazy, and don’t lack compassion, and they ARE underpaid badly. Every one of them is stuck at the nurse’s station sorting through the electronic equivalent of a foot-high stack of paperwork per patient per day, and if they don’t slog through all of that pointless drivel designed to satisfy an administrator, a tyrannical government and those through which feel entitled, or some #$*&^@$ lawyer, then they will get fired. Hospitals are run by, and rely upon nurses in a system long since transitioned from delivering care, to delivering the appearance of care, and it is crushing everyone involved.