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Philadelphia Personal Injury Attorney Blog | Pomerantz Perlberger & Lewis LLP
Philadelphia Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice Attorneys serving the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania areas. Pomerantz, Perlberger and Lewis have extensive experience with serious injuries as a result of someone else's negligence.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Economic downturn forces nurses to work extra shifts, helping to address nursing shortage
According to the Wall Street Journal, the economic downturn has "prompted" nurses to work extra shifts, which has, in the words of the Kaiser Family Foundation (no longer associated with Kaiser Permanente), has helped to "address [the] nursing shortage" faced by hospitals and nursing homes. However, one wonders whether this solution is a good one. Working extra shifts leads to fatigue, and fatigue leads to mistakes, medical malpractice, and wrongful deaths.
On the other hand, previous solutions to the nursing shortage included a number of short-program for-profit schools rushing barely qualified nurses into the hospital. So how are we to address this problem?
Perhaps nurses need better pay and more respect. Compared to doctors, nurses make very little, although they often do most of the work. If nurses received better compensation and more respect, more highly-qualified people would enter the nursing profession and stay, moving up in the hierarchy to supervise and mentor incoming nurses.
If you or a loved one has suffered as a result of a nursing error, whether that nurse was fatigued from working extra shifts or poorly trained by a for-profit school, contact the experienced medical malpractice attorneys at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation.
posted by Dr. Candelaria at 5:21:00 PM
1Comments:
Healthcare may be the fastest growing industry, but it also suffers from a horrendous lack of computerization. While your fast food order is now entirely automated, most hospitals still do their record-keeping on paper. That's where nursing informatics professionals come in. Nearly 100,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors, which digital record-keeping could help to eliminate. Nursing informatics specialists, with training in both nursing and health information technology, bridge the gap between IT and patient care--an essential part of healthcare in the future. The Nurse Company Realizes this, and it has become their goal to intergrate technology to bring the nurse profession up to speed. Shawn D. Mathis, the CEO of The Nurse Company, calls this Nurse Profession 2.0. He has also written a book by the same title, detailing the use of technology to solve the global nursing shortage.
(http://www.thenursecompany.com)
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