Patient Benefits in Unionized vs Non-Unionized Hospitals Employing Travel Nurses

Patient Benefits in Unionized vs Non-Unionized Hospitals Employing Travel Nurses
The debate rages on in the field of nursing about the quality of patient care and after care and the impact of unionization on our current system. With the shortages of nurses becoming severe in this country and the institutional stresses and pressures, many nurses feel disenfranchised both by physicians and healthcare administrators.
With California, Massachusetts and Maryland RN unions teaming together and still other RN unions following suit, whether to organize or not and the implications this has on patient care is becoming a real institutional issue.
Opinion is certainly mixed about the issue, with some nurses skeptical about the changes a union can produce when faced with hospital bureaucracy and the dwindling supply of new graduating nurses while more experienced nurses reduce their work time. Some nurses in unionized environments see no improvements in staffing and are concerned about high union dues. Other RNs agree unions are essential to pay nurses top wages in order to support health care and reduce turnover. Hospital administrators who oppose unionization announce that there is in fact no reason for hospitals to become unionized. Hospitals that provide poor patient care will simply lose to other more productive hospitals.
But do independent studies support the idea that unionization will reduce patient care and after care and decrease productivity? Actually independent studies confirm that patient care actually increases, and for reasons apart from just fairer wages. Nursing unions have been pushing to establish RN to patient staffing ratios as well as reduce the overburdening of nurses who often have to perform tasks that aren’t at all their responsibility, and have them focus on their own duties. Patients are also being pushed out sooner, forcing nurses to do more work with their available time and take on more patients. This in turn elevates the risk of patient death.
Establishing RN to patient ratios through unions is actually one way of addressing nurse shortages in hospitals. However, nursing shortages continue to be a problem all across the country in both unionized and non-unionized environments and this has critical implications for patients. While patient care can arguably increase in unionized hospitals, it still won’t increase a lot with the few nurses that currently work in hospitals.
Traveling nursing services can help make up for the shortfall in non-unionized environments and travel nurses can and do work in unionized environment. Traveling nurse agencies send out travel nurses who supersede the union requirement for temporary assignments.
Travel nurse jobs can help ensure the continuity of patient care since travel nursing agencies are experienced and can help relieve a temporary shortage while a hospital deals with more serious organizational issues, since travel nurses can be employed for weeks on end, offering high quality care for an extended period, even up to a year. Hospitals can save money as well, while not having to pay benefits, insurance and sick leave, and most crucially, not have to close their beds due to nurse shortages, which is the first step at providing quality patient care.

Article written by a guest blogger and client of:

Adam Brown

www.purecontent.com

RNs Decry Obama’s Federal Pay Freeze

Last week, President Obama—whose healthcare ideals had heretofore earned the loyalty of reformist RNs across the continent—disappointed many of them by proposing a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal employees, including the 16,000 physicians and medical personnel who care for our veterans.

RNs Outraged

National Nurses United co-president Jean Ross called the move, “salt to the already festering wound” of the administration’s lack of cooperation in expanding collective-bargaining rights for VA nurses. The union (comprising of 160,000 RNs, including 7,000 VA RNs), shook their heads at the pay freeze proposal and declared that “ending the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq once and for all” was a better avenue for cutting federal expenditures than punishing the nurses that care for those who come home from the wars.

A Political Move

In announcing his proposal, President Obama said, “In these challenging times, we want the best and brightest to join and make a difference. But these are also times when all of us are called on to make some sacrifices, and I’m asking civil servants to do what they’ve always done—to play their part.” The move received nods from Republicans, who will take the House in January 2011.

American Federation of Government Employees National President John Gage retorted, “A federal pay freeze saves peanuts at best and, while he may mean it as just a public relations gestures, this is no time for political scapegoating. The American people didn’t vote to stick it to a VA nursing assistant making $28,000 a year.” He added, “It’s unconscionable for him to attack the wages of federal working people while the millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street not only get their bailouts and astronomical bonuses; they also get their tax cuts.”

The peanuts being proposed to be saved amount up to $2 billion in the current fiscal year, and because the scheduled raises will not be retroactively implemented after the fiscal crisis, the pay freeze schedules to save $28 in five years and $60 through 2021.

More Harm Than Good?

Nevertheless, the Economic Policy Institute (a Washington think tank with organized labor sympathies) declared that the proposed pay freeze would not only harm morale and save “chump change,” it would also reinforce conservative myths that federal workers are overpaid. “Such a policy also ignores the fact that deficit reduction and loss of pay at a time when the unemployment remains above 9% will only weaken a too-weak economy.”

For nurses already suffering funding (or perceived funding) shortages and hardship at the workplace, this could mean little good.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she's been researching different bsw degree programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

The Real Reasons Behind the Nursing Shortage

Many of the causes of the nursing shortage stems from one fundamental problem: a lack of understanding and respect for registered nurses on the behalf of hospital decision-makers, physicians, and even the general public.

To review, the American (and worldwide) cutback on public and private insurance reimbursement rates in the 1990s steeped healthcare in hot water, and many hospital higher-ups restructured so that, theoretically, fewer registered nurses performed a greater number of tasks. Underempowered nurses were and remain unable to fight back against this manner of tyranny. The overwhelming image of nurses today—despite heroes like Florence Nightingale and Mary Breckinridge—continues to evoke a fluffy, semi-useless Caucasian woman in an adorable uniform. They are the stuff of Halloween costumes and sexual fantasies, not respected and functional members of the medical community as they ought to be.

This seemingly innocuous, if not exasperating, misconception leads to much more devastating causes of today’s nursing shortage.

Funding (or Perceived Funding) Shortage

If nurses are undervalued, it is no surprise that the National Institutes of Health budgets only 0.5% of its funds to the field. With funding in short supply, new nurses cannot be trained, and nursing schools daily turn away countless qualified and eager applicants.

There is also little pay to be doled out to those who do make it—in fact, nurse educators only earn three-fourths of what faculty in other academic disciplines earn. Whereas women—as nursing has retained, as per stereotype, a heavily female-dominant demographic—in other fields have at least cracked through the glass ceiling, nurses have made little progress over the years.

It becomes obvious that it is not funding shortage, per se, but rather a perceived funding shortage that leads to the lack of education of new nurses and short-staffing of current ones. The common view is that money simply cannot be spared on those seen as non-essential personnel. Even if hospitals with perspective want to hire more nurses, they do not have the funds—or the desire to use funds—to pay them.

Poor Work Conditions

With hospital decision-makers devaluing RNs, it is no surprise that nurses are short-staffed and expected to perform more with less. This workload causes stress and, inevitably, mistakes. Many physicians treat nurses as if they were non-essential personnel, leading to lack of respect and trust between the two and often major communication failures that can result in anything from minor annoyances to patient deaths. Add poor salaries and chronic stress to the mix and you have a handful of very unhappy nurses.

Simply because fewer nurses are on duty does not mean their actual duties go away. Without nurses to pay to perform these duties, however, the responsibility has fallen to unlicensed assistive personnel. Sometimes, these duties are not even performed.

Education

This goes back to funding (or perceived funding) shortages. Too few nurses today receive too little training and social empowerment skills to truly excel in their field. Researchers note that formal education and more efficient and pleasant work environments make for nurses with better patient outcomes. Such expertise cannot be taught on an existing nurse shortage.

Gender and Age

Meanwhile, current (female) nurses are only aging, leaving behind few apprentices to take up after them. The world of women has grown in past decades to the point that nursing is no longer a popular occupational choice, and although men have slowly joined ranks among women in nursing, they only account for 6% of American RNs. This accounts for the shortage of individuals who even want to become nurses.

The Solution

Recently, efforts toward scholarships and loan forgiveness for nurses have been made, but such will not improve the underlying cause of these shortages: the misunderstanding of an RN’s role in the medical field in general.

Since media has proved to be an effective tool in changing public and professional views on healthcare and the medical field, such must be employed to improve the general public’s understanding of nursing. In order to improve healthcare in the US and the world, the nurses must shake off their dusty image of ages past and advance with the times.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she's been researching different pharmacist degrees and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.