Nurses Again!

I was unable to "Blog" for the past 6 days! This post was intended for November 22nd, 2008

A VOCM Question of The Day!

Do you think the Williams government would be justified in taking the 20% over 4 years off the table if the economy keeps struggling? Why or why not?

Yes Indeed: Healthcare has become the provinces biggest expense and being as diverse as what it is, our government must rely on common sense approach in recognizing what is too much, in one diversity, and what is not enough in another. Equally however, government must recognize the dire need to re-establish systemic self management, rather than rely on top heavy, costly, mismanaged and duplicated health authorities.

Newfoundland has approximately 500,000 persons in this province served by four health authorities. Each of these authorities serve to: 1. Duplicate management cost by four times, with more than $600,000.00 in four executive director salaries, and more than 4.6 million dollars in executive office salaries and benefits for the authorities alone. 2. To confuse otherwise unilateral provincial policy, by allowing obvious variances in the delivery and or assessment for services.

Newfoundland isn’t a big land mass, political system, or populous. But we are huge in Health and Education Authorities, and Political District offices. One management team, for each service will save this province hundreds of millions of dollars in duplicated services.

Though nurses are a very important component in healthcare, I believe there has to be an accepted threshold in what we are willing to pay our nurses, and other public service workers. Surely we must consider individual diversities, but I am sure that the baseline salary of $50,000.00 for an R.N in this province is enough.

A nurse earning baseline $50,000.00 now, will be earning $60,742.66 in four years. We have to stop somewhere.

The common person do not realize that in this particular case, one-on-one nursing care in hospital for patient is about 30 minutes per shift. Family members primarily do the rest for most bed ridden patients. If the patient is able to get out of bed, wash and dress themselves, one-on-one is to hand a pill, do a blood pressure or check a temperature.

In a 12 hour shift with 5 duty nurses per unit, @ 30 Minutes Max, there would need to be 120 patients at any given time being cared for. Since that patient number according to research, is more like 25 patients per unit, then the need for more than three nurses per shift would be over extending.

Some food for thought, a homecare worker, responsible for all care, including medical is paid $9.29! Who works the hardest? Who gets paid more?

Brudder