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November 2009
 

slashfairy
Date: 2009-11-12 08:52
Subject: Medical, nursing schools need to work together | Healthcare Finance News
Security: Public
Tags:citizen's rights and responsibilities, economics, education, ethics, health, medicine, nursing, politics

Medical, nursing schools need to work together | Healthcare Finance News

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No shit. Ya think?
And it'd be nice to have Nursing's voice taken seriously. Tell the truth- when's the last time (and I love my docs, love love love them) the doctor spent 8 hours at your bedside in ICU, put in your IV in ER, or wiped up your vomit on the med/surg floor? [And if your nurse/nurse's aid DIDN'T, that's not a criticism of nursing. It's a criticism of how thinly stretched nursing is.]

I'm inviting responses, dialogue, criticism, commentary, and your stories. I've got something brewing that can't quite come to a boil, yet, about all this and the health-care/health insurance/public health/personal health debacle/debate that's going on nationally, but I need more points of view, more facets, to properly focus the light so I can see what I'm really looking at.

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slashfairy
Date: 2009-11-01 18:23
Subject: semi-coherent rant about nursing/medical shows
Security: Public
Tags:education, ethics, nursing, tv

ok, nursing/medical shows? get your shit together. it doesn't take that much longer to do things right- trust me, i've been an RN for thirty years. it really doesn't take any time at all to do it right.

what brought this on? decided to check out Three Rivers tonight.

oh, god, the amount of money spent on fancy monitors and yet you can't get the mask on the respiratory patient correctly? you can't wipe off the connections before giving IV meds? you can't put the rails up on people's beds? but you can have fbi escorts through bomb scares, and people go off to surgery without a signed consent or any kind of checklist even a nameband, and the transplant surgeon comes into OR with her hair hanging out of her cap? yes, it's great that you've got a female transplant surgeon- so why does she have to be sloppy? why aren't the nurses on top of their patients' vitals- oh, i know because nurses don't actually do anything, except steal drugs (nurse jackie) or sleep with the docs (mercy).

it'd be SO EASY to do these little things correctly. so easy. and give people just that much more of a fighting chance of understanding how things work when they go to the hospital. which would be nice, yanno? because we have enough to do, doing things right, without cleaning up misconceptions people get from your sloppy misleading television.

just sayin.

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slashfairy
Date: 2009-08-31 04:42
Subject: So, yanno? I'm a nurse. It's my job: sometimes (often) I worry about our (communal) health...
Security: Public
Tags:despair work, economics, environment, ethics, health, hope, native american issues, nurse-intuitive, nursing, political science

What I watched on TV tonight at work:
Water's Edge: Profits and Policy: Behind the Rising Catastrophe of Floods
Mountain Top Removal ( Wiki article ) ( series on youtube )

I have some thoughts about it all, but cannot avoid sinking into horrid and vicious cynicism- and while that might feel good for a moment, it's not an appropriate response for someone with my education and background. I'm trained to look at this from a community health perspective: as an RN, I have an obligation to do just that. Risk management, genetics, environmental safety- those are all within my purview as a nurse. So it behooves me to stop, just a moment longer, marshall my thoughts, and organize them so that I can pursue this with some clarity.

Because right now? I'm just pissed.

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slashfairy
Date: 2009-05-12 13:12
Subject: International Nurses Day
Security: Public
Mood:pleased
Music:The Rainbow Quest/Pete Seeger
Tags:community, friends, ican, ippnw, nursing, writing

Is today. Florence Nightingale's birthday.
In her honor, three things. Gifts for her, maybe, or for all of us.

It's also Fibromyalgia Awareness Day

FM awareness day at Chronic Pain/Karen Lee Richards
Personal story


It's International Nurses' Day. It's ten days until I graduate with my BSN. One thing I have learned over the long haul is, nursing applies to everything, and everything applies to nursing. Florence, with her meticulous data collection and interpretation and the help of a few well-placed friends, brought the British Government to a completely different understanding of how a man wounded at the front should be treated, and why. It took her over a decade just to be heard- she is my model for keeping on keeping on.

All that said: I went back to school to get my BSN after getting my RN because I have a concern, as Quakers say: I'm concerned about the presence of nuclear weapons on the planet. I find them to be the single most expensive public health hazard of our times, and I want them gone. An Ounce of Prevention launched yesterday. This is my professional blog: This is where I am pursuing my goal in connection with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. I am keeping this identity separate from that one for reasons of focus, but you're all welcome to read there, to find me on Twitter and Facebook, and help me help others have better health/lives/world. (Ideas for columns gratefully accepted, caveat being, I'll be writing about it from my angle. Just so we're clear. I can't write the column you would, but I might be able to host it as a guest column. We can talk about it.)

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slashfairy
Date: 2009-03-31 15:09
Subject: moar books, movies, etc.
Security: Public
Tags:amazon, black studies, books, child lit, education, europe 2009, friends, fun, gender studies, history, language, lj, movies, music, native american studies, nursing, philosophy, psychology, religion, women's studies

Apparel and shoes on sale at Amazon until April 3rd. (yeah, I get referral points if you buy after going in through my portal. geez, don't I sound like a pro, or a shill, or something? lol)

Sample listings:

A Tolkien Treasury )

Amy's Eyes
Read more... )

BRITISH COLUMBIA: A CENTENNIAL ANTHOLOGY [Hardcover] Edited by Reginald E. Watters
The five sections of this Centennial Anthology attempt to portray in words and B&W pictures the varied life of British Columbia in both the past and present.



30 Days to a Simpler Life; A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies; Boycott; Capitol Hill in Black and White; Canciones Infantiles [Audio CD] El patio de mi casa; Child in the Night [VHS Tape] JoBeth Williams; Tom Skerritt; Tim Choate, Elijah Wood IMDb; Conservation Medicine: Ecological Health in Practice [Hardcover] Gary M. Tabor; Core Curriculum for Lactation Consultant Practice [Paperback] by Walker, Marsha; Essentials of Nursing Research: Methods, Appraisal, and Utilization; Eve's Bayou [DVD] Jurnee Smollett; Meagan Good; Samuel L. Jackson; Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols by Bynum, Caroline W.; Guide to Rembering Japanese Characters (Tuttle language library); Howard Street by Nathan C. Heard; Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West by Rebecca Solnit; Spiritual Gardening [Audiobook] by Handelsman, Judith (cassettes) among other books, movies, and music.

joomla counter

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slashfairy
Date: 2008-10-05 03:12
Subject: health care musings, and a request of the fabulous friends-list
Security: Public
Tags:economics, education, friends, health, health care, lj, nursing, politics, writing

Everyone should have health insurance? I say everyone should have health care. I'm not selling insurance.
—Dennis Kucinich
(from Perceval Press)

I'm not so inexperienced as to think that it's enough to say "Everyone, keep yourself healthy!" Or so negative as to think that it's someone's fault if I get sick, or so naive as to think that doctors should know everything or so cynical as to think all doctors (hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, nursing agencies) are only in it for the money.

But seriously.
I'm very interested- personally as well as professionally- in how health care reaches people, and what people expect "health care" to be. How do I, a registered nurse, make available my knowledge, skills, and experience, if I'm not going to do it within the confines of a hospital system, the state/federal public health system, or an agency? Can I charge for it? Barter for goods or services? What risk do I assume? What risk does someone I work with assume?

On the larger scale, do we, as health care "consumers", have any obligation to stay as healthy as possible, to reduce the pressure on those who provide us with basic health care? When private industry takes over the municipal water supply or the garbage pick-up, how does a citizen ensure his or her neighborhood, town, city is safe and sanitary?

What is possible, at the overarching level of the State? How feasible is employer-based insurance? Insurance in general? What are the obligations of the individual-in terms of caring for oneself, for one's family, community, the organizations that provide care?

One of the things that came up at dinner tonight was that Kaiser Permanente has figured out that, with only 2 percent of medical students planning to go into primary care, it needs to take care of the primary care MDs it already has, since it "needs to make them last", as my friend put it. She is 63, had, 10 years ago, her own practice, which she had to give up when spiraling costs and sinking reimbursements made it impossible to continue and still pay off her medical school debt as well as care for her family.

You know what I'd like? If you would give me your experiences- good or bad, honest, I'm interested in all sides- with health care, lack of health care, health care access, health insurance (employer or government based, US or in another country)- how it's changed for you over time, or depending on your age, or status (student, military, married or not, employed or not, healthy or not, pre-existing condition or evolving condition). It feels to me like there's something in this- an article, or series of articles, at least, for one of the nursing magazines- and, in some paradise of enough time and energy and focus and luck, a book or two or three (perhaps one for nurses, one for the public, and those children's books I so want to write about being healthy, having a healthy community). But I can't write anything with only my own experience- so if you would be willing to share yours, or even point me in the direction of things you know or have experienced, but anonymously- I would appreciate it tremendously.

Of course, I would keep any confidences. That's my obligation as an RN- but more, it's my obligation to you as a person, one person to another.

And on that note... /ramble.

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