Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Nurses doing housekeeping chores

---including cleaning and decontaminating patient care areas. Hard to believe but true according to a TV news report.

A particularly rich piece of the corporate spin concerning the measure is found at 1:06 into the video with the reference to Florence Nightingale.

HT to the blogger at ofcourseitsaboutyou who said:

Especially insulting is the implication that Florence Nightingale would have wanted nurses to return to doing housekeeping in the hospital. Nightingale wanted nursing to move forward, not backward.

Vandy is pretty resource heavy and the place I'd least expect this to happen.

When I first saw the report I thought somebody was joking. But as I thought more I realized that this is not the first time health care workers have been pushed outside their professional boundaries. Doctors, for example, were asked to become secretaries with the rollout of CPOE. Few dared to call it out as it was so cleverly disguised as technology for the enhancement of patient safety.

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