[admin]

I have been a nurse for 6 years. What have I learned during this time? I have learned I love patient care and working with families and assisting them in making hard decisions concerning their loved ones.

What do I dislike? Nurses garner no respect from their peers, managers, or administration. Families treat the hospital like it is supposed to be a 5 star hotel.

Administration feels to improve patient satisfaction nurses need to complete more paperwork to ensure you were in the room hourly, your patient was turned, you crossed all your T's and dotted all your I's.

Instead of decreasing the patient load to increase moral and patient satisfaction, patient load has increased to 7 patients on some floors. How on earth does a nurse take care of 7 patients without forgetting something, not documenting something, or giving wrong medications because they are so busy.

I left the floor after 3 years. It scared me to be so busy and unable to critically think through my actions.

I work with home health now and also teach clinicals for our local college. I tell the students the truth when they ask me about nursing. If I had it to do all over again, knowing what I know now, I would have chosen another profession. I did work in the corporate world for many years but wanted to help people. Like many I thought I could bring some change to nursing.

We need nurses unions to step in so we can have set limits on patient load. We also, need to stop the lateral violence in the workplace. Many nurses are mean, nasty and verbally violent towards their co-workers. To stop this, managers need to have a no tolerance policy towards the above. What I do find is the managers are the ones who are allowing the lateral violence. So, how do we change our profession? Decreased patient loads, no tolerance for lateral violence, and fire the managers/nurses on the spot if they are abusive.

Will this happen? Nope. It is only going to get worse in the hospitals. What future holds for healthcare is dire...

With all the above said, I am glad I am nurse, but not in a hospital.