Some helpful and/or interesting links to start off your week

Sorry it’s been a while.  To get things re-started, here are a couple of links that we thought you might find interesting…

• From our friends at Nurse.com comes a report of a potentially catastrophic by-product of budget cuts in education.
• And Health News Digest reports on an emerging trend of surveying pediatric patients on the quality of their medical care and care-givers.  How novel and overdue.
• The Wall St. Journal’s Health Blog reports that the number of uninsureds among the 19-26 year-old set is declining, largely in part to the nation’s controversial new health law.
• Fierce Healthcare explores the financial impact to hospitals of the looming cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.  Don’t expect that to be the last you hear of this debate for a while.

Hopefully that will tide you over for a while.  We’ll try to be better about posting more often from here on out.

Very cool site alert

If you haven’t already checked out Laid Off Lounge, you need to.  It’s a great resource for any who may be out of work or looking to make a change.  I recently did an interview with them regarding the state of hiring in the medical field as seen from the MedJobsPost perspective.  You can read it here.  As always, we’d love to hear your comments or thoughts.

Don’t call it a comeback…

So…sorry it’s been a while since our last post.  Between a pronounced summer slowdown on the work front, and quite the opposite on the home front, well, did I mention how sorry I was?  At any rate, and without further adieu, I do want to draw your attention to a couple of trending topics in the world of healthcare:

• First, from our friends at Fierce Healthcare comes news of projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that the healthcare field will add 4 million jobs by 2018, with most of those coming from the fields of home healthcare and nursing homes/long-term care facilities.  As if on cue, Medicare and Medicaid are set to re-evaluate how those facilities get paid in the next few months.
• From the “Politics Makes For Strange Bedfellows” department comes this report of a doctor actively campaigning for a single-payer system.
• Meanwhile, the WSJ Health Blog encourages doctors and nurses to play nice.

So I hope that will both give our loyal readers something to talk/think about, as well as getting your humble blogger back on his horse and back to blogging on a more regular basis.  Thanks for sticking with us.

Clarence Clemons: Mental Health Professional

If my loyal readers- both of them- will permit me an aside, I wanted to commemorate the passing over the weekend of Rock and Roll legend and E Street Band Saxophonist Clarence Clemons.  The Big Man helped make a lot of the music that has helped me get through more than one rough patch in my life, and he will be missed.

 

Counterpoint

Predictably and understandably, the ANA has taken exception with the KPMG study I linked below.  Their contention seems to take a three-pronged approach: first, they argue  that the sample size for the study is too small.  Point taken.  The next exception they take is the fact that no Chief Nursing Officers were surveyed among the sample of hospital administrators who were included.  I totally understand their position there.  Finally, they contend that no consideration was given to the value of the level of care that nurses offer, which is also true.  But man…how do you even attempt to quantify something like that?

This is a debate that it would behoove me to stay out of, even if I wanted to take sides, which, of course, I don’t.  Tough one, all the way around.

New KPMG Study on Hospital Labor Costs

Some interesting stuff here.  I don’t know that any of it is altogether shocking, but it does crystallize some matters.

Top 10 Reasons to Become a Nurse

Saw this one on the bulletin board in an office I used to call on in/around Macon years ago…

10- It pays better than Waffle House, though the hours aren’t as good.

9- Fashionable shoes & sexy white uniforms.

8- Needles: ’tis better to give than to receive.

7- To reassure your patients that all bleeding stops….eventually.

6- To expose yourself to rare, exotic, & exciting new diseases.

5- Interesting aromas.

4- To do enough charting to circumnavigate the world.

3- So you can celebrate the holidays with all of your friends…..at work.

2- To take comfort that most of your patients survive no matter what you do to them.

And the number one reason to become a nurse…

Dealing with courteous & infallible doctors who always leave clear orders in perfectly legible handwriting.

The only logical conclusion here?

Hire more nurses, of course.

Of Zombies and Apocalypse

MJB fave WSJ Health Blog has some fun with the CDC’s already self-deprecatory Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness advice here.  Having some first hand knowledge of the zombie set from having spent a couple of sweltering days in latex zombie makeup, working on the set of AMC’s The Walking Dead last summer, I can tell you those zombies mean business.  And they just…won’t…die…

I can only hope all our dedicated medical personnel and first responders out there heed well the CDC’s advice.

Let The Smoker Beware

It’s sometimes amazing to me, having grown up in a time when smoking was so common, exactly how rare it is to encounter a smoker anymore.  The stigma applied to tobacco users of any stripe today is stark, indeed.  It is not without reason that smoking has become so comparatively rare, though I don’t think we need to rehash the multitude of health risks here.  They are fairly well-chronicled elsewhere.  As smokers and other tobacco users have felt themselves edged out to the margins of public places and polite society all over America, there seem to be precious fewer places for them to hide or to enjoy whatever momentary pleasure they derive from their nicotine fix, and the walls are closing even further.

More and more hospitals and healthcare facilities around the country today are requiring that their employees be completely nicotine free.  Not just at work.  At all.  Most will even require that all candidates have remained nicotine free for a pre-determined period of time, commonly 6 months.  Most of those employing such policies incorporate nicotine testing into their routine preemployment drug screens, some going even further by testing for popular cessation aids.  Any positive tests for nicotine or a cessation aid automatically kicks that candidate out of the pool, though they can usually re-apply at a later date.

Is such a policy fair?  Does it go too far for an employer to legislate what an employee does on their own time, within the bounds of legality?  I’m not a lawyer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I really can’t weigh in on that aspect.  I can say that it makes a whole lot of sense for a facility whose express purpose is restoring, promoting, and advancing better health to require that its employees walk that particular walk, so I’ve got no problem with it from that angle.  I know I wouldn’t see a physician or other healthcare professional I knew to be a smoker.  How about you?