After having the full battery of tests performed and getting her checked into a room, her temperature started to come down and the pain started to subside to the point that she started to critique the bedside manner of the nurses attending her.  THAT’s when the fun began!

Now, being a nurse and a patient at the same time is a double-edged sword.  On the plus side, you have ample medical knowledge and experience so you usually know what your body’s doing.  You also tend to have a pretty good network of medical professionals as well as access to all the medical “back channels.”  For example, Teri called and left a message for her doctor and the guy actually called her back!  

On the negative side, you can’t help but compare what everyone is doing, or not doing, with how you would have done it.  I got an earful of which nurse knew what they were doing and which one(s) didn’t have a clue.  After a while, I started to get an idea of how a hospital ward functions.

It turns out that there are nurses with two different nursing “styles.”  The first is hands on and proactive.  At the beginning of each shift, the nurse is supposed to make their rounds going to each patient, introducing themselves, and putting their hands physically on the patient as they check pulse, listen to their breathing, check their IV, and so on.  It doesn’t sound like much but an experienced nurse can tell a lot from this – like whether or not the patient is lucid and responsive, for example.  Being proactive and looking for potential problems before they occur is how Teri was taught so she expected the same kind of treatment.

The second nursing “style” is reactive.  This type of nurse clocks in and sits at the front desk and watches the board or does paperwork.  They assume that if a patient is having a problem, they’ll push the call button.  Then the nurse will get up and go see what the problem is and deal with it.  If no one calls with a problem, they won’t go looking for one.  This kind of nurse drives Teri bats, and after unsuccessfully waiting close to an hour after shift change for the nurse to show up, Teri finally went out to the Nurses Station looking for her.  She told me later that they had “had words.”

Why the difference I wondered?  One answer is the shortage of qualified nurses.  One blog post titled “The American Nurse, our New Endangered Species,” put it this way:

It’s the year 2020 and you’re in the hospital for a minor elective procedure that requires an overnight stay.  Lying in your bed, you try to call for a nurse.  You send your Tweet to the nurses desk.  No nurse.  You Tweet again, and again, and again.  Where is the nurse????  The nurse never comes, because there are no nurses.

A bit farfetched, but the American health system has a problem brewing that has nothing to do with the current healthcare reform legislation.  According to Marla Salmon, Dean of the University of Washington School Of Nursing, “We’re actually at a crisis point in terms of the shortage of nurses.” 

So add being short staffed and overworked to the already overloaded US medical system.   However, this post isn’t about what’s wrong with the healthcare system.  I wanted to pass along some advice on how best to deal with it.

So what can you do if you’re a patient?  Do the same thing Teri did – get out of bed (if you can, of course) and track down to the Nurses Station and ask who your nurse is.  Ask how long their shift is.  Ask what your treatment regimen is.  Ask what instructions (if any) the doctor left.  These are all things the nurse should have come and told you when they began their shift.  If they didn’t – if it’s starting to look like they’re not the proactive type – then YOU need to be the one that’s proactive.  

Some people just don’t want to be a bother.  However, you can NOT take that attitude when you’re in the hospital.  You’ve got to be like Teri – a “squeaky wheel” that keeps calling until they get what they’re supposed to be getting, when they’re supposed to be getting it.  If your doctor prescribes a type of medication every 4 hours (like an antibiotic), you need to have it every 4 hours – not whenever the nurse gets around to it.

When I went to check Teri out of the hospital, most of the other nurses were glad to see her go.  However, she left healthy – which was the whole point of the hospital stay in the first place!

Certified Fitness Nutrition Coach and
Personal Fitness Trainer (NESTA)

P.S. Be sure to get my latest Fitness Blueprint called “Little Things That Improve Your Health.” This ebook is packed with loads of helpful information on how to build a better body and you can get it FREE – for a limited time.  Just click on the title to be taken to the download page.  Enjoy!

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Now this is a fitness and health site, not a political one, so I really don’t want to get into the many, many arguments for and against the various proposals that have been promoted and discussed by both sides of the political aisle.  However, I do want to bring up one important point:  we really cannot afford to sit around and do nothing.

The reason why is summed up in a recent report titled, “Health Reform: The Cost of Failure” by The Urban Institute, a bipartisan think tank that studies social issues.  Here’s what it says…

The May 2009 study looked at what would happen to trends in health coverage and costs if healthcare reforms are not enacted, in other words, if we do nothing.  It’s not a pretty picture.

Using a computer simulation model, the Urban Institute looked at the current trends in insurance coverage and health costs and projected them out 10 years in the future for each of the 50 states.  Here’s a summary of what they found:

• There should be no surprise that of all income levels affected, the middle-class would be hardest hit with individual and family out-of-pocket costs increasing by more than 35%.
• In 29 states, the number of people without insurance would increase by more than 30%.  All told, the number of uninsured Americans would reach 65.7 million.
• Businesses would see their premiums continue to increase with it more than doubling in 27 states.
• Every state would see a smaller share of it’s population with employer-sponsored insurance.  (Why is that?  See the previous bullet point.)
• Every state would see its Medicare/CHIP spending rise by more than 75% by 2019 with half the states facing increases of more than 100%.
• The amount of uncompensated care – this is the cost of treating people with no health insurance and a cost that we ALL pay for in one way or another – would more than double in 45 states.

Like I said, it’s not a pretty picture, and in my opinion, a big reason for getting some sort of reform passed.  Again, I don’t want to debate the specific proposals that have been put on the table.  I just want to re-enforce the point that we can’t afford to do nothing.

As a small business owner, I’ve personally seen the cost of providing medical insurance for our employees go up significantly over the past 3 years.  At first, our premiums went up around 10% from the previous year (no real change in the number of employees or number of claims).  Now, our premiums have jumped 35% from the previous year – again with no real change in the number of employees or in the number of claims.

“No problem, you say.  All you have to do is to pass that additional cost to your customers, right?” Sorry, it doesn’t work that way – not in the middle of a recession.  There’s too much competition, many of which don’t provide any insurance at all for their employees, willing to do the same job for less.  It doesn’t take you long to realize that things have got to change.

No matter which way your political beliefs lean, no matter which news network you watch, no matter what the radio talk show hosts say, the way we insure and pay for healthcare has simply got to change.

Again, you can download the Urban Institute’s report here.

Hiram
The Balanced Health Guy

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