Whew!! Made it to the 26th! that quiet, backwater day in which the ripples of time and events start to diminish...soon the pool will be calm again as the giant rock of Christmas sinks to the bottom.
Unless you've gone out shopping, I suppose...in which case your ripples may last longer...
I like the feeling of "reset" the holidays give me. I do feel like the new year is a new start somehow, and I can put all of my errors and regrets for 2008 into a box, seal it with packing tape and forget about it...2009 is a new, empty box, free of error for a moment, with plenty of room to begin the new collection....or to attempt again, a year free of sin.
I sin more and more as the year wears on. I get tired of being good, don't you? By December I've become my evil twin. I'm impatient with clients' problems, my friends are all exhausting, I have no money (well that's nothing new, really...just more apparent), nobody loves me and I can't stand anybody. Universal Peace and Love are a distant memory...and I'm just holding on, waiting for the big rock of Christmas to hit, because I know things will subside afterwards.
And today they are subsiding! I checked for comments for the first time in weeks and published the ones that were there - sorry about the delay. I've enabled instant comments so that won't keep happening as we (Orpheus and I) wander in and out of Blog Awareness. Now when you comment, it should publish automatically.
I'm looking forward to seeing the Obama administration's version of health care. I saw a lady on CNBC this morning talking about a "health care bubble".... and she was making sense. "Bubble" combined with any economic sector is ominous. And I am constantly nagged by Obama's insistence that making all medical records digital will somehow be the cure for something important. It makes me think he may be laboring under the impression that HIPPA works, too. I wish all politicians in a position to make health care policy were required to experience healthcare first hand for long enough to really get a taste for how cumbersome and unprivate HIPPA has made things. I want someone to get it with me that digital records makes your private healthcare information available to anyone with a financial or legal interest in you, along with their employees in the thousands, but keeps you, your family and your friends signing endless numbers of consent forms when they should be holding your hand or sponging your brow.
I know, I know: pharmacists can't read the Doctors' writing and give the wrong pills, the patient is unconscious and can't provide the relevant history, the patient forgets to mention they've got seven other pain pill prescriptions from seven other Doctors....I know, I know...
But I just want healthcare to be more personal than that, I guess. I'd like the Doctor to talk to my family who'll give the history. So they're wrong - that's what it's like to be human. I don't want to be tuned up like a car based on what the average performance index is...science hasn't accounted entirely for "healing" yet and I want the intangible part.
Anyway.
Hope all of your holidays were happy and that you, too, experience a feeling of renewal. And, Good Luck to all of us in the new year!...we seem to be approaching it with some trepidation; let's think of it as the much to be desired end of the consumer society. Let's develop some other interests this year. I'll bet we could think of something worthwhile.
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6 comments:
Just checking to see if the instant comment function works!
It does!
checking one last time
You are correct, the holidays are over and the slate is clean unless, of course, you work at the fort. The budget is once again in crisis, therefore staffing and safety have again been discarded. Yet JCAHO is coming, but yet again no one will speak up and tell the truth. Everyone will keep quiet so the threat of being closed down will go away. Patients will remain unmedicated and continue to terrorize units. Ineffective people will continue to demoralize the competent staff...there really are a few of them, and both the patients and the staff will continue to be assaulted. Unfortunately staff also get verbally assaulted by the patients, their coworkers, and even the DON. How can patients get healthy in that environment?
Now the powers that be push staff to accept patients who need 24 hour one to one staff by promises of adequate staffing. Then once the patients are admitted the staffing is cut. Unfortunately since so many patients have been admitted that truly don't belong, the budget is now in crisis again. So instead of finding other placements for the one to one patients, the DON just cuts staff leaving the line staff to get assaulted once again. To top it off next week starts the new hospital wide NO SMOKING policy. Short tempered patients and staff on units that are under staffed. Not the best way to start the new year.
Then there is the so called morale issue. For some reason no one can figure out why morale is low. So one teams solution is to implement a parking space for their "catch of the week". Sounds like an efficient way to use the parking lot to me. Save a spot 168 hours a week for someone who may use it 40 hours. Then, if any other person should be unlucky enough to park in it make sure you harass them with phone calls or notes. I can see the increase in morale already....or maybe that was the decrease in common sense I noticed.
What can one expect when people at the fort are so devalued. It's not just the staff, obviously patient care is not a high priority either. If it was adequate staff would be scheduled, inappropriate patients would not be admitted, and people like the DON would treat others with respect.
Doesn't seem to be any real future at the fort. With all the neighboring hospitals eliminating their psych units, how long will it be before the fort closes completely or begins shutting units as well?
Lets hope the political climate brings about some positive change. We can even hope some of the higher ups will realize they are ineffective and damaging and retire or just move on.
Until then, I'll just be glad I still get paid and keep looking for a more fulfilling and safer job for my future.
Even Colorado Wins hasn't been any help. Then they don't plan to do anything for a few years so they can "study the issues" and collect our money. Too bad they didn't tell anyone that up front, could have saved us all some effort.
As I sit here and read these articles it makes me a little more human to know that we have other people in this place that make me feel normal. Many a nights I go home only to sit an ponder that I can't believe some of the things I see on a daily basis. It distrubs me to see certain social workers taking long lunches, coming in late, leaving early and don't take the time. Some have no clue what it would be like to live like some of these mentally ill patients living on the streets and trying to cope with life and not have family support. My heart does go out to some of our clients and I am truely concerned about the smoking policies. Why didn't we start cutting back on the smoke breaks in the begining of December instead just going cold turkey.
Given the Gov's state of the state speech, I doubt there will be any pay raises this year. I'll be glad if we keep up with rising medical cost and don't have employee cuts. Although getting both of those is a pipe dream.
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