It's always the nurse

Yeah
gonna get on my soap box.
And though this is a medical-y thing, I think that I want to respond here for a few reasons.
One is because you, the "customers" of health care and hospitals, are getting bombarded with news stories this week about how unsafe care is
and the other is because all the medical people who read First Do No Harm already realize what I am about to say.

Lets start with yesterdays study. The one that claims that one in 15 children in the hospital will come to harm.
This is bullshit. The fact of that study is, they did it in Los Angeles, at 14 hospitals there.
Since when does Los Angeles constitute all the hospitals in the United States? And to add more insult to injury, over and over again on the news, (which was on in the lounge I was waiting for my Jeep in) Doctors were interviewed, and they ALL threw the nurses under the bus. It seems that this is all our fault. NOT the MD's who order things, NOT the drug companies who put lethal doses of drugs in packages that look JUST LIKE other, non lethal doses. Its the Nurse's fault.
Now I will say, any smart, observant nurse, ESPECIALLY with pediatric patients, is VERY VERY careful about what he/she is giving them. We have a policy, at my Podunk, that 2 nurses check EVERY medication given to a kid. And that even means calculating the dose of what we are giving to ensure it is correct for their age and weight. Have mistakes been made? Only one that I can think of. (and thank God I wasn't part of it.)
That kid is fine, btw.
Today, I had a second screen up, scanning the news, because I was searching for blog fodder. And lo!
Another article about people in hospitals. This time, it says that nurses are failing to notice when their patients are having complications that could/do lead to their death. They figured this out by going through the records of Medicare patients
HELLO!
one thing they leave out is that most of the states o this union do not have a safe nurse to patient ratio. (California does). Many of these nurses are caring for up to 15 patients at a time!
And, complications arise practically instantaneously, swiftly, and without warning. We do our best to notice everything around us. And, how old is the average Medicare patient? Truthfully? Elderly. And they die. Of complications. That we DO notice. If someone is going to die, and it is their time, I can stand on my head whistling Dixie while ten others around me do the hokey pokey and it won't make a difference in the outcome. DEATH HAPPENS. We can't live forever.
I am not claiming hospitals are the safest places on earth, nor that every nurse in this world is a perfect little robot who never makes mistakes.
What I am saying, though, is that it as not as bad as the media is portraying this week.
And if I see one more picture of Dennis Quaid on TV, I am going to start throwing rotten tomato's at it....
ok. Rant over.