The Pros And Cons Of Look After Nurses

Perhaps one the most respected professions on this planet is certainly being a nurse, of any kind, whether you are a Licensed Vocational Nurse, Registered Nurse or a Nursing Assistant, the amount of adoration that follows those jobs around is obvious to most. But one of the better kept details of the downside of being a nurse are often mocked as mistreatment from doctors and administration who belittle them hilariously on TV or patients who are cranky old men who don’t want to take their medication that the nurse had to bend over backwards to get despite it being regular Tylenol. With this much grief, fowl treatment and downright abuse, there are still champions that fight for a career that changes lives on a daily basis in nearly all parts …show more content…
When that issue happens to be a nurse stealing powerful pain medication, what can be done “nurses look after nurses”. Hospitals are multi-million dollar establishments, so minimizing scandal is incredibly important, so even if a nurse is caught abusing drugs, it has to depend on who caught them and unless it is traced back to the hospital and they are liable a hospital won’t pursue any action most of the time. Nurses and doctors are encouraged to join a self help group for their treatment, there are programs specifically designed to help them after they’ve left. However, these programs are run through each state’s individual Board of Nursing, these boards have no distinction between those who seek help, those who are caught and those who have hit rock bottom. This translates to no incentive for a nurse who is currently using drugs on the job, the scary part of that is there are no definitive numbers on how many nurses are currently using drugs, who they have harmed, how badly those people have been harmed so on and so forth. The nearest estimates, according to the FDA there are over 1 million serious medication errors every year in the US, that equates to at least one patient death every …show more content…
The reason why this is so important is because there are no time or resources to help most of these nurses. There has been a national nursing shortage, and we have been in one off and on since the 1930s. This is something that truly affects us all, because of the growing rate of people over the age of 65, the average age of an RN has jumped from 42.7 years in 2000 to 44.6 in 2010. There are scores of reports and estimates that go as high as a 20% increase in job openings for nurses by 2022, yet those positions are being filled at a much slower rate. An aging workforce caring for an even larger and more medically diverse, older generation leads to major trouble for us