Keeping you Updated
Hospitals are still struggling.
Things remain ugly, as these articles attest.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/11/20/hospital-capacity-rsv-flu-covid/
As I’ve said so many times, try your best to stay healthy, avoid putting your infants and elderly at risk and stay away from emergency departments unless you believe you are really having an emergency. (Sounds like an odd way of putting it, but not all cases treated in the “emergency department” are actually emergencies in the true sense.)
Wait times are high, acuity (the degree of illness) is high, staffing is low and these are the times when mistakes are made. Not because of uncaring staff but because medicine is a finite activity.
We do not have infinate nurses, infinite physicians, infinite respiratory therapists or paramedics. We do not have infinite ambulances.
We do not have infinite medications or even (as we learned during COVID) oxygen supplies. We do not have infinite rooms or stretchers.
(We may have an infinite supply of administrators, in fact, but research is ongoing.)
Props to Prisma Health in Greenville, SC by the way. They actually cut non-clinical staff. While I feel badly for those who lost jobs, it’s better than cutting nurses and others at the bedside. https://www.foxcarolina.com/2022/11/08/prisma-health-eliminates-positions-following-issues-pandemic/
Anyway, try to stay healthy this Holiday season!
Edwin
Recently retired after 39 years as a nurse. My main reason is to babysit my granddaughter (first living grandchild) when my daughter returns to work. One of my mantras these past few years has been, “the patients aren’t going away just because there is no staff...” but no one seems to know how to hang on to good people or how teamwork is supposed to work...and I just can’t anymore. (My apologies, that is an awful run-on sentence. A glimpse into how my brain works these days...)