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In The News: Nursing Facility Evacuated Due to Staff No Shows

April 9, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Did you hear about this one? Link: Staff No-Shows, Deaths Hit California Nursing Facilities

I heard about this yesterday. A nursing facility a few miles south of me was evacuated when the staff failed to show up for work. According to this news report nearly 3 dozen residents have tested positive for COVID-19. After many employees failed to show up for the second day in a row, all 83 patients had to be evacuated and sent to different facilities.

These workers were criticized by the county public health officer:

“Nationwide all of our health care workers are considered heroes, and they rightly are,” said Dr. Cameron Kaiser, the county’s public health officer. “But implicit in that heroism is that people stay at their post.”

Kaiser said it’s up to state regulators to determine if the workers are punished for abandoning patients.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/california/riverside-nursing-facility-evacuated-after-staff-no-shows/2301888/

However, others defended the workers stating that their fear of going to work without adequate protective equipment was understandable. The article I linked above, however, does not mention this as the specific reason for the large number of no-shows by staff.

Another article I found had this to say:

Natalie Visnick, a spokeswoman for the American Health Care Association, a nonprofit group representing more than 14,000 nursing homes and other care facilities, said the Riverside issue “signals a larger, pressing issue.”

“Health care workers in long-term care are having to put their lives (and their family members who they return home to) on the line every day for their residents,” she said in an email. “Meanwhile, nursing homes and assisted living communities continue to desperately need the resources that will help them battle this virus, including personal protective equipment.”

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10884395-181/riverside-nursing-facility-evacuated-after?sba=AAS

This second article seems to imply that fear of catching COVID-19 due to insufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) may have been what led to the large number of no-shows. Later the article quotes the director for the county’s Emergency Management Department:

Bruce Barton, director of the county’s Emergency Management Department, made an impassioned plea for volunteers to work at nursing facilities, promising those who sign up will get adequate safety equipment and malpractice coverage.

“We are in immediate need for help to care for our most vulnerable patients,” Barton said. “Please come join us.”

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10884395-181/riverside-nursing-facility-evacuated-after?sba=AAS

So let’s assume that the no-shows were due to lack of PPE. Do I blame these healthcare workers for refusing to show up? I have wrestled with this question ever since learning about what happened and I don’t claim to have an answer. I don’t think there is a “good” answer.

When I started this post I thought that by writing out my thoughts I would be able to process the information and possibly come to some sort of conclusion. But as I’ve typed away I don’t feel any closer to a neat and clean position on this all.

Many have compared this pandemic to a war.

Sometimes, in war, there are no neat and clean answers.

Filed Under: After Residency, My Life, News, Opinion Tagged With: , , , , ,
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Pandemic!

March 25, 2020 by Leave a Comment

It is painful to watch the amount of distrust or disbelief amongst the public – even among those who are in healthcare. Last week I saw an article about young people still going on about their usual life, not willing to put things on hold. One of the people interviewed was a nurse.

I saw another article from this week that beaches remain open in Florida for spring break. Parties were just told that they must keep their groups to 10 or less. However, the article also showed a picture taken on a Florida beach in Clearwater that showed pretty crowded situations (the picture was taken on 3/27/2020).

Sometimes I just want to face palm.

Filed Under: After Residency, My Life, News, Opinion Tagged With: , , ,
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Good job, Senators

July 26, 2017 by Leave a Comment

After all the waiting and political posturing, today the U.S. senated voted no on a straight repeal of the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare).

In the days leading up to this you heard many, including POTUS, urged the senators who had campaigned on repeal of the ACA to step up and deliver on their promise.

Today, the U.S. Senate voted not to repeal.

For those who had campaigned on the promise of repeal but decided to vote No because it hurt your constituents, I respect you.

Campaigning for something and then trying to follow through blindly despite learning how it hurts those you represent is — well to me, it isn’t doing your job at all.

The ACA isn’t perfect.

But a full repeal that would result in coverage loss for millions of Americans with no answer in sight is downright wreckless.

Filed Under: News, Opinion Tagged With: , , , ,
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The Event — It’s Time to Clean This House

November 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Let’s ignore the details — for a moment — of what has happened in the city of Ferguson from the day Michael Brown was shot until the decision of the grand jury not to indict Darren Wilson was announced. Let’s compress it into a singular event.

Essentially, that event seems to have thrown open this nation’s closet door. It’s the closet into which we have thrown all our racially charged skeletons for the sake of appearing tidy, clean, and welcoming to guests who may come to visit — or the nosy neighbors who might peer through open windows. It’s a closet that has been stuffed full and whose contents burst out as soon as that door cracked open. But the Event didn’t crack the closet door open; it violently flung it open and exposed our darkest secrets to a watching international audience.

Whether or not you believe that the Event was motivated by racial undertones or not, it has pulled back the covers to reveal a deep pain, anger, and mistrust that was conveniently pushed aside or ignored for a very long time.

It’s time for this House to have an honest, deep, rip-the-carpet-out, fix-the-bannister, get-rid-of-all-the-termites type of spring cleaning. Or else watch as this House crumbles from the inside.

Filed Under: Opinion, Other Tagged With: , , , ,
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The Almost-Kamikaze American Pilots

September 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since the Twin Towers fell. In these last few days there have been numerous articles about that day and of memorials being held in NYC. For the most part I have stayed away from them. While I do think it is important for us to remember what happened, I think I just wanted to avoid it this week.

But one article caught my attention and I couldn’t help but click on it. It told of the two pilots who were ordered to intercept Flight 93. Back in 2001, there were no fighter jets that were armed and ready to take off to intercept planes. It was a different time.

When the order came to intercept Flight 93, the two pilots, Lt. Heather Penney and Col. Marc Sasseville, could not wait for their planes to be armed. They took off with only 105 lead-nosed bullets and the knowledge that those bullets wouldn’t do the job.

From the article:

“It was decided that Sass and I would take off first, even though we knew we would end up having to take off before our aircraft were armed,” Penney, among the first generation of American female fighter pilots, said to C-SPAN.

Penney said each jet had 105 lead-nosed bullets on board, but little more.

“As we were putting on our flight gear … Sass looked at me and said, ‘I’ll ram the cockpit.’ And I had made the decision that I would take the tail off the aircraft,” Penney recalled.

Both pilots thought about whether they would have enough time to eject before impact.

“I was hoping to do both at the same time,” Sasseville told the Washington Post. “It probably wasn’t going to work, but that’s what I was hoping.”

Penney, a rookie fight pilot, worried about missing her target.

“You only got one chance. You don’t want to eject and then miss. You’ve got to be able to stick with it the whole way,” she said.

The pilots chose their impact spots in order to minimize the debris field on the ground. A plane with no nose and no tail would likely fall straight out of the sky, its forward momentum halted, Penney said.

I read the article and was just amazed and reminded about what our men and women in uniform are willing to do for us each day.

Source: MSNBC.com

Filed Under: News, Opinion, Other Tagged With: , , ,
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Doctors & Nurses

July 9, 2011 by 7 Comments

Unfortunately, it seems that many nurses have a bitter feeling towards doctors. I can’t say I know why. But only because I don’t know their perspective. I can only speculate. But I’d venture to guess that at the core, it is an issue of feeling unappreciated and disrespected by doctors. Those feelings can then easily turn into resentment.

Are those feelings unwarranted? Sadly, no. I’ve seen too many instances where a doctor brushes off a nurse. I’ve seen times when the nurse feel slighted about something a doctor has done. Most of the time, at least I hope, it was not intentional on the physician’s part. But these little things add up over time on a mental score card that is not always unbiased.

They say that $h!t flows downward. This is especially true for hierarchies. In the grand scheme of things, whether you like it or not, the doctor is often at the top. Their signature, their orders. So when an attending mistreats a resident, the resident has a bad day. The resident snaps at a nurse. The nurse has a bad day. The scared medical student asks for help and the nurse glares back.

But the problem is that medical students don’t stay students forever. They remember feeling marginalized by the nurse that had a bad day. And it’s that much easier for them to brush of nurses when they earn their stripes. The cycle needs to stop.

Filed Under: Medical School, My Life, Opinion Tagged With: ,
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Book Review: Doctor Confidential — Secrets Behind the Veil

May 3, 2011 by 1 Comment

Doctor Confidential
Last month I received an advanced copy of this book. This book, Doctor Confidential: Secrets Behind the Veil by Dr. Richard Sheff, was released this past Sunday (May 1).

Dr. Sheff is a family physician with over 30 years of experience in practice. In this book, Sheff eloquently and openly shares stories that have stayed with him through the his time as a student, then as an intern, then a junior resident, and finally as a senior resident. Readers who are unfamiliar with the world of medicine will be happy to know that this book should be understood by the lay person. When the story being recounted requires the use of medical jargon, footnotes offer a clear explanation.

As a medical student, I couldn’t help but smile when reading through portions of the book recounting Sheff’s medical school experiences. At times, I had to remind myself that Dr. Sheff attended medical school a couple decades ago. Yet some things never change — and other things change very little.

One piece of advice that a senior medical student shared with Sheff, and that Sheff subsequently shares with his readers, is to remember that “Medicine is a bottomless pit. You can pour all of yourself into it, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and still not fill it up — still not do enough for your teachers or for your patients. Only you can decide when you’ve done enough.” It is short. It is brief. But it is profound. And those who have gone through medical school will likely agree with this statement. It is a pity that many hear this later than necessary. As I began reading the book, it was nuggets of wisdom like these that kept be going.

As the book continues, Sheff describes the slow, gradual change from student to doctor through many memorable stories. They are poignant stories that question the system of healthcare and healthcare education we have in place in America, and ultimately accomplishes what the book set out to do — to reveal the “secrets behind the veil.”

If you are interested in getting a look behind the scenes, I’d recommend this book. And if you are a medical student like me, I think you will enjoy reading someone eloquently express many of the feelings we experience during our clerkship years.

Filed Under: Opinion, Other Tagged With: , , ,