The latest edition of the Best In Nurse Blogs-my bi-weekly focus on the best writing by, for, or about Nurses!
Best In Nurse Blogs:
The Nurse Blogosphere has exploded with articles, posts, diatribes, rants, about the pending case of Amanda Trujillo, MSN.
All for one?
The Incident as I understand it:
Ms Trujillo was fired and has been threatened with the loss of her nursing license. She reports she was acting as a patient advocate/educator. The patient in question was scheduled for a liver transplant.
Nurse Trujillo advised the patient that other options besides surgery were available. The patient apparently requested information about hospice care options before having the surgery-and the nurse ordered a hospice consult. This resulted in her firing and subsequent license review/hearing.
The details of her plight have been well documented elsewhere and I dedicate this version of The Best In Nurse Blogs to those writers.
Those Emergency Blues inital post, with an additional video montage from several nurse advocates.
Nurse Keith, the Nurse Coach at Digital Doorway
The Healthcare Team is broken
What I want to discuss today is not the details of this case as the eloquent nurse advocates listed above and many others are better able to do so.
What I want to discuss is the big picture. The big picture which has allowed this event to trigger the spark that has become a wildfire of indignation and resentment.
As sad as this case is, it is just a microcosm of a problem that exists in our current healthcare system.
Our current healthcare system is broken. And the fix (and I’m skeptical of the current misguided attempts) will be complicated and painful.
What can be done?
It will not be fixed until physicians, nurses, techs and hospital administrators get on the same team. Being teammates is not possible when we allow fellow physicians to bully, verbally abuse, berate, belittle, or ignore other members of the healthcare team.
How many times have we seen sports teams with great athletes lose in their chase for a championship? One or two “Stars” behave selfishly and refuse to be a true “teammate”-poisoning the efforts of all the other team members.
In healthcare, losing doesn’t mean losing a game or a championship, it may mean losing a life, needlessly.
Until we start taking the “team” approach seriously and not just give it lip service, we are doomed. The healthcare dollar is shrinking and as administrators struggle with keeping their facilities’ doors open, it is just too easy to appease the Docs who order the tests and admit the patients and drive the income.
Even when those same docs are abusive, egotistical boors.
- There has to be a consequence to those physicians who can’t be civil.
- There has to be a support system and non-judgmental investigative system in place to separate the whining, he said, she said, trivial issues from the truly malignant incidents that shouldn’t be allowed in a modern healthcare facility.
- There has to be a system that enforces accountability when a physician can’t control his temper, yells or screams, throws instruments and loses control. We can’t just (wink, wink) say, “He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s a good surgeon and accounts for 30% of the hospital revenue (wink wink…).
Every nurse, when reading the details surrounding the Trujillo case, concludes the nurse is being abused by the system. That her rights to assist her patient with information, because it was in conflict with the physician, were abrogated.
Nurses believe this happened in this case because they see it happen in their institution, day in and day out.
I’ve seen it at every level of my experience. As a high school student shadowing a physician, as a medical student, as a resident, and it continues even today after 26 years in practice. Doctors continue to abuse nurses and staff members. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it crosses the line to behavior that would be illegal if it occurred elsewhere.
This has to stop.
Reader Questions:
What are your thoughts, not about this incident, but about the big picture? What can be done to improve and develop a collegial healthcare atmosphere? Please, let’s have a constructive dialogue.
{photo credit: dawnmanser c.c.}
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