Hospitals Ravaged by Recession Pile More Work on Staff

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/2010/01/hospitals-ravaged-recession-pile-more-work-staff

Mischa Gaus | February 3, 2010

Hospital work is thought to be recession-proof. No matter what the economy, people get sick and need care.

The work is there, but at a cost: hospital workers and researchers say some hospitals are churning through a round of reorganization, strapping on more work, skimping on training, and trying to stuff contract concessions through.

Increased hospital workloads are linked to bad economies: the last big push started in the early ’90s downturn, says Judy Shindul-Rothschild, who researches nursing at Boston College.

That episode was about de-skilling: management consultants substituted lower-cost, less-skilled workers for higher-cost nurses. Today’s squeeze is especially strong at hospitals with many uninsured and underinsured patients. Worse, Shindul-Rothschild says, the national health care reform now stuck in Congress might intensify the problem.
DO MORE WITH LESS

When Temple University Health System closed its Northeastern Hospital in Philadelphia last year, patients flooded into the flagship Temple facility, overloading the ER. Patients sit in wheelchairs while nurses scramble to evaluate them and find increasingly scarce rooms.

“You have to just push, push, push,” said Patty Eakin, a Temple ER nurse and president of PASNAP, a Pennsylvania nurse and professionals union. “It’s exhausting and worrisome. You always wonder if you did enough.”

FULL story at link.

[SheilaT]

1. Oh, yes.

I worked from June of last year through January of this year at a hospital doing patient registration. I was not happy with the poor training, which was really the fault of the person who was the trainer. She had no idea how to present the information in a logical and useful way. We were not all that well paid, although the benefits were pretty good.

What I most disliked was that we had to do something called "code scrubbing" for Medicare Patients, meaning we had to figure out if Medicare would pay for the procedure or test ordered based on the diagnosis given. There's an entire job category of coding, and people go to school for a couple of semesters to learn that stuff. We felt very strongly that we should not be coding. Oh, yeah, and coders get paid a whole lot more than we did.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg about what hospitals and their staffs are dealing with.

[uppityperson]

2. k&r indeed.

I just burnt out, first time in over 30 yrs working as a nurse, because of the increased workload and decreased staffing. Not a hospital, but another facility. I hope this changes soon as it is not healthy for staff or patients.