I woke this AM and had a revelation. Nursing has it’s own “Occupy” movment, It’s the “support Amanda Trujillo” movement.
I still stand by my original statement from over a month ago, that this is a local issue, a human resource issue. Banner Del Webb may be the worst company to work for in the history of nursing. But as much as the Amanda supporters try, as long as they keep it about Amanda, it’s not going anywhere. They aren’t being censored, they are being ignored. I’ve talked to some of the professional organizations about their “lack of support” for Amanda, in their opinion; it doesn’t involve their members, so they aren’t taking a stand, if they were to make that position statement publicly, the supporters wouldn’t like it, because it wouldn’t be supportive of her.
What the Amanda Trujillo case is showing us is that there is a subset of nurses who feel like victims. The easiest thing to do is to lash out, point fingers, tear at their clothes and gnash their teeth and tell everyone how bad things are. It’s a bit harder to actually come up with possible solution. It’s a lot harder to use their voice to actually start positive chance.
Just like the Occupy Wall Street movement. After a few months of front page attention, it’s pretty much gone. Just like the Amanda Trujillo case, there were people who were and are emotional, and get their dander up when confronted in any form. There were people on both sides who went to extremes.
No one is saying that being a nurse in today’s health care environment is easy. On the contrary it’s hard, back breaking and mind numbing work. It’s a job that has ever increasing demands on it’s time, it’s has employers that put revenue before its staff, it has legislators that are passing legislation affecting our careers when they have no clue about health care. It has administrators that can only look at nurses as a line item on a budget or cost report.
But let me tell you, it’s still the best job around and I really can’t imagine doing anything else for a living.
I can tell you this, I’m NOT A VICTIM. Let me tell you about my profession of nursing. The Amanda supporters talk about all the phone calls and letters they have gotten about wrong doings against nurses. Well let me tell you about the emails and calls I’ve gotten. Let me tell you about my experience
It’s Dr Peter Pronovost at Johns Hopkins, empowering the nursing staff to stop a provider if they see a break in aseptic technique.
It’s Dr Pamela Lipsett, not only talking to nurses as equals, but expecting them to know the answers when the interns and residents didn’t.
At the University of Colorado hospital, its Dr’s Druck and Morchi, telling the residents, that it’s the nurse’s job to protect the patients from their mistakes, and that they should be thankful that the nurses are there. And then taking the time to explain a disease process to the nurses, and explain it as an equal.
In New York it’s Dr Scott Weingart who belives that critical patients, deserve the same level of care in the ED as in the ICU and then not only expects the nurses to be able to provide that care, but teaches them at the bedside and empoywers them to be critical care nurses.
It’s a family practice doctor in rural KS who recognized that the big city nurse, who ended up working in her hospital, knows more about certain things than she did, and learned from the nurse.
It’s the young nurse, who had read about this concept called Therapeutic Hypothermia, and put together a package and sold the concept to the medical staff, who a year after implementation, saved one of their own when the doc went down at church on Sunday morning.
It’s a nurse in rural GA standing in a nurse’s station, looking 3 md’s in the eye and telling them that this patient needs to be transferred now, and then proceeds to put forth a logical, science based case for her stand. It’s those MD’s coming to her the next morning and saying thank you.
It’s about thousands of critical care nurses, standing, cheering and clapping at a national conference, when they hear stories of nurses, advocating for their patients, their coworkers and themselves.
My vision of nurses is a profession, were nurses stand tall, stand together, it’s a proffesion of bold, knowledgeable individuals who know how to stand stands up for their patients.
I was told by one of the Amanda supports that he felt sorry for me, that I was in a sad state if I didn’t believe her based on her word alone. Well when my vision of nursing as a profession is so far from the picture they paint, it’s no wonder.
Again nursing is hard; it’s not perfect, there are abusive MD’s and abusive nurses, and abusive organizations.
STOP POINTING FINGERS, STOP ACTING LIKE A VICTIM. STAND TALL, BE A NURSE.
Stop telling the world had bad it is, instead, make it better.
p.s. This is the last post I’m going to make about Amanda, it’s time for me to practice what I preach. To let it die, and instead look for solutions, not to fix a problem, but to improve our profesions. I challenge and encourage any of the half a dozen people who actually read this blog, to start looking for solutions. Get involved.
Craig, perhaps I’m missing something in the tenor of the post, because I don’t understand how the profession can be encouraged to “stand together” and “get involved” and ignore potential implications in this case. The wonderful examples you shared are precisely the type of collaborative professional issues that are – as I understand them – at issue in the Trujillo case. While I may be less read on the matter than are you, I don’t perceive this case to be about “victimization,” though it may be easy to so characterize it.
As I see it, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to be a widely popular, ground-swell, grass-roots response to abuses by high flying Wall Street financiers and their lobbyists upon Congress, to eliminate protections against economic abuse that has harmed individuals, and more broadly, our national – even global – economy. One very significant law was the Glass-Steagall Act, which forbade the commingling of three types finance business activities – Insurance, Wall Street brokerages & Banking. The protections inherent in the Glass-Steagall Act have all but been eliminated.
Speaking from the Senate floor November 04, 1999, the late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Min.) warned that deregulation of financial markets in S. 900 (aka “Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999″) would allow Wall Street speculators to become involved in real estate, credit default swaps, derivatives and other highly technical and inherently risky financial vehicles. Colloquially, the commingling of Wall Street, Insurance & Banks could be described as an incestuous fiscal orgy.
(Sen. Wellstone’s testimony on Thursday, November 4, 1999 are in the Congressional Record, 106th Congress. Vol. 145, No. 154, pages S13871-13874 – may be found here: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1999-11-04/pdf/CREC-1999-11-04-pt1-PgS13871-8.pdf)
Fast forward to 2012.
The economic poop has already hit the fan, and even Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has argued for reinstatement of the protection & provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act to prevent such another tragedy as has happened.
How does that relate to the Trujillo case? Well, I don’t see that it does, but since you had mentioned the OWS movement and used it as a parallel – IMO, that was a poor analogy – I felt it necessary to provide some background to illustrate.
Granted, there may be a segment of the Professional Nursing population which feels “victimized,” however, while our human nature is more readily attuned to passion, our intellectual nature remains preeminent.
But if we continue with parallels of the analogy – OWS:Trujillo – we can see something bad is about to happen.
One reason I’m not a profesional writer. The comparison was more a statement about a loud group of people complaining, but not actually having any real solutions. Although there are still groups of the OWS out there, it’s getting almost no press. It’s a non entity now. That is what I expect to happen with the loud voices in the support Amanda corner. The number of voices has diminished, some becasue of short attention spans, others because they can’t maintain an argument. The only voices that are left are the ones shouting, “it’s the end of nusing as we know it”. Yes it’s an exageration. But the constant requests for a position statement, The constant, you should be afraid for your license tweets are just that voices, not backed by anything other than one questionable story by one nurse in one state, at one hospital. Yes we know there are problems out there. No one has said there isn’t.problems, everyone has agreed that the board of nurses are poorly designed and can function without what most would consider due process. Hospitals whether for profit or not for profi,t are to focused on revenue.
We hear constanly about all these other nruses that are comming forward and about this class action that is comming. Although the number of complaints being filed with BON’s has increased the past few years, it’s unclear why. That is a piece of information that we as a corperate body need to know. It’s time to start moving forward. We can’t afford the time and effort of screaming they are out to get us. We need to start moving foreard. It’s time for solutions. Not fear. It’s time for discusion, from both sides.
This post had nothing to do with the causes of the OWS, or anything like that, you give me to much credit.
I understand now what you mean. There will always be voices crying “the sky is falling,” whenever a falling acorn hits one of ‘em on the head.
One of the many things that has ticked me off about Amandagate from the beginning has been the total inability for nurses to focus on the issues and not on Amanda. Any attempt to focus on the issues at hand and not on her (specifically, supporting her) has been rebuffed. I am at a loss as to how anyone can say her case is not about victimization. She is claiming to have PTSD from her experiences and nurses are giving her money because of how unfairly she was treated by the bad bad hospital. That screams victim, and it makes us all look bad. I’ve always agreed with the principles behind the case (we need to collaborate, throwing fits at work is bad, nurses’ scope of practice is being alarmingly curtailed…), but what she started is the antithesis of collaboration. What she started is divisiveness in the profession. I don’t know how much responsibility to assign to her personally and how much to her supporters, who have made supporting her and libelously attacking those who question her a full-time job, but the result is the same.