This transcript of a press conference by Obama gives (to me, anyway) an insight into what it might be like to have a president who can think again. Meanwhile, I’m glad for people like you willing to take the time both to go to the sources, and to write about it.

Clinical nurses are almost all working as employees, and that is the source of the autonomy and professional control problem. Until a mechanism for practice brings all nurses: managerial, clinical, academic and research - together and hold all nurses accountable to their nurse colleagues, to the nursing profession and to patients over loyalty to employers and payers, these problems will remain.

And so, in the end, it is nurses who are accountable for changing nursing. Legislating away nursing’s judgment about nursing practice isn’t the answer, either.

I write about ways to do just this via self-governed nursing organizations and professional practice groups.

It is unconscionable what is being done to nurses - specifically to you from what you write - but it will not change until nurses take back nursing and own it.

That will mean radical action, but how much worse will it have to get before the tipping point is reached?

I didn’t mean to convey blame against individual nurses, and I apologize if that meaning came across.

I hope you’ll stick around, read some of the other posts I’ve written about nursing and write some yourself!

I think that the US is perpetuating a new cadre of Josef Mengeles. That’s why I call for the mass resignation of USPHS commissioned officers. If they are carrying out illegal orders, then they must resign, as this is a duty of all those commissioned in the uniformed services.

Do you think bedside nurses have not tried and tried and been continually beaten down trying to accomplish that very thing? After 30 years of bedside nursing, I have been labeled a troublemaker, a non-team player, negative and a chronic malcontent when I bring to the attention of my managers, supervisors and administrators dangerous, unsafe scenarios, generally connected to poor nurse:patient ratio, based on patient acuity. I have been denied advancements, salary raises and now within the last year, trouble finding a job within my own area of Indiana because my former employer of 26 years has “passed on” all of those characterizations. Nothing in writing, only what I have heard from other would-be employers. I have tried refusing to work in situations of too few nurses for the acuity of patients, only to be told that refusing will cost me my job (THEN who is responsible for my patients?), will be reported to the BON as “abandonment” potentially leading to the loss of my license to practice or “If you don’t like it here, there’s the door”.

I would LOVE to change these things….but it is NOT solely the responsibility of the professional nurse. We used to be treated as physician handmaidens in the early 20th century. We’ve become increasingly knowledgeable and responsible but are still considered just “part of the room cost” because what we offer can’t be quantified by the bean conters. When hospital budgets get tight, they look to their biggest expenditure: nursing. Can’t cut too many, so we’ll just cut back on the ancillary help: read, now the RNs are doing the work of dietary, housekeeping, clerking, IV teams, EKG techs, Respiratory therapists (unless it involves a ventilator), referees/security when things go bad with family and friends, counselors, pastoral care, social work, discharge planning….have I left anything out? But the assignment load remains the same…and the hospital population has dramatically changed from when I first started nursing.

Only VERY, VERY sick people are in hospitals. If they are halfways healthy, care is done on outpatient, home care, doctor’s office or free-standing surgery center basis. No longer does someone just come in for “simple” surgeries and the patients are more complicated with multiple co-morbidities.

And now the push is on for making the hospitals “marketable”: let’s be nicer than St. Whoever down the street. Not just any TV, but 35″ plasma flat screens with HD, cable and built in computers where patients who are computer savvy can contact various departments to personally lodge complaints. I am told to smile and be nice no matter what the unit is going through crisis-wise as we don’t want to lose any of our customers. Big hospitals have become big hotels: and the patients and family will let you know that they “got better treatment and service at the Marriott last year for less cost” than they are experienceing here!.

Is it any wonder that more and more nurses are leaving, retiring early or have given up fighting the good fight, because they don’t see Heaven at the end of the race, only a shabby pension, no health insurance, maybe Social Security with bad backs, bad knees and bad feet. Wait…is it too late to change back to being just Cherry Ames, student nurse and swooning over Dr. Kildare?

There comes a point where you just grow weary and pray that you will be around long enough to monitor the healthcare delivered to your own family and loved ones.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-8466.ZO.html

So it’s unconstitutional as well. These people broke many laws. If any of Ade’s problems recur, they broke all of them. Relieving them of their licenses would only be a prelude to prison terms under normal circumstances.

http://www.aclusandiego.org/article_downloads/000256/Woods%20v.%20Meyers%20Complaint.pdf

My suspicion is the same interagency deal is still in effect, but nobody wants this baby now. You know more about nurses and doctors, but EMTs (mentioned in the first article) operate under medical directors, who establish the protocols they must follow. They don’t practice except as delegation of physicians authority or as Good Samaritans. From that perspective, I’d go after the medical protocols and the directors who signed them. If DIHS is the medical authority, I’d guess it’s the same, find the name of the person who signed the DIHS protocols.

Those nurses in part 4 didn’t just commit malpractice, they committed at least CIDT (defined in the U.S. as violation of 5th, 8th, 14th amendments), and at most torture, depending on whether their treatments (esp. in Ade’s case) caused any long term effects (longterm effects are needed only under U.S. statute not under the UNCAT). Sounds as if the program knew it too, that’s why at the slightest hint of legal attention, they started saying they needed court orders. The court knew it as well, they refused to give such an order.