Chetzemoka
I was being hyperbolic; I thought that would be obvious.
not nearly as easily or quickly as they can move staffing agencies in the current climate
You and I must work in very different current climates.
You didn't personally experience that anecdote (and it's also just an anecdote). Show me a NURSING union that protects people who are dangers to that level. We don't because it's not our professional culture, so it's not how we run our unions. The president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association is still a practicing nurse. She has no personal or professional interest in protecting nurses who are genuinely dangerous.
I also have 20 years experience in management prior to becoming a nurse, including quality, safety and accident investigation experience. One accident doesn't prove that an employee is bad, no matter how much damage it cost. Systemic errors exist. Was that guy being impatient because management was on his ass to do more and more with less and less support? Holding him to an impossible schedule like they do the rail workers? How was he able to have his truck in a situation like that in the first place? Did he bypass safety signalling/communication, or did the signaling/communication policies not exist in the first place? If that driver was genuinely a dangerous employee and had no prior disciplinary action, then that's a management failure to document concerning actions in the past. None of that has anything to do with the union and the union was right to stick to the letter of the contract.
And policing needs to be reformed top to bottom. Union protection alone is not sufficient to create the culture of abusive power that exists in modern policing. That requires the full complicity of our legislative and judicial branches. (See: "tough on crime" politicians and SCOTUS shielding cops from accountability and responsibility.)
I think that's going to be difficult to determine because we also are much better at diagnosing these things now. My grandfather had colon cancer requiring a full ileostomy at age 50, and it was only in retrospect after sooooo many younger members of our family were diagnosed with Crohn's that we realized his lifelong GI problems and young age colon cancer were probably a life of undiagnosed and untreated Crohn's.
And the further complicating factor of the increasing numbers of young people getting colon cancer these days for reasons we still haven't determined.
The most acute brain shit responded beautifully to 9 months of high dose IV steroids, thank God. The rest of the shit, I have a patchwork of treatments that have improved my symptoms enough to keep me minimally functional, but not back to where I was before all this happened. (Tl;dr - in addition to autoimmune encephalitis, I jokingly call it hipster Long Covid. I got "Long Covid" before Covid was cool, aka ME/CFS)
Mayo is definitely one of the right places for you to go. Just keep hammering on it.
Yeah I'm sorry you're going through all this. Believe me, I know all too well that feeling of insecurity when you're in healthcare facility limbo. Ration your strength, but keep pushing on them. These obstacles can be cleared.
And I was literally insane back when I was playing this game trying to get seen at Mass General autoimmune neurology. (Psychosis from an autoimmune brain condition.)
You can get through this.
Get on the cancellation list anyway; just tell them you need more than 24 hours notice. Call them and explain that your symptoms are causing severe weight loss and see what they can do for you.The big facilities are very willing to work with people who come in from a distance.
My family all receive our care at Cleveland Clinic, which is 4 hours from my mom's house and 6 hours from my sister. They've worked with us a lot. They've squeezed us in before. I'm sure Mayo is used to dealing with the same kind of situations.
they can just choose to go to a different staffing agency
That's just free market labor. Shit hospital nurses are free to bounce from facility to facility as well. Welcome to America.
A union gives me more power to enact change inside my own corporation-owned facility. Staffing negotiations give me leverage to force staffing levels that keep my patients both safe and receiving the care that they need.
I had a woman sitting in her own feces for over an hour on Sunday because our hospital chooses not to staff the central stock room on weekends and holidays, and we were completely out of the only size briefs that would fit her. I checked the next unit over and they were out too. This is a standard item that should be stocked at all times. I had to ask one of our transporters hunt them down for us.
Part of our union contract will be to demand that our local unit supply rooms are stocked no less than once per day 365 days a year. It's INSANE that an American hospital chooses to operate without that.
"The union" doesn't do anything. WE are the union. I AM the union. I'm planning to be one of the people sitting right there at the negotiation table working on our contract. WE will be the ones negotiating how disciplinary grievances are handled and the union only exists to provide us with legal representation to ensure that OUR chosen contract terms are adhered to.
Why do American nurses in particular believe such heinous lies and propaganda about how unions work? You overheard some hearsay from someone about a union that doesn't even represent nurses and you just swallowed that hook, line, and sinker?
Get a referral from your primary care, book the first available appointment even if it's 9 months away, and ask them to put you on their cancellation list. You have to be able to make yourself available with about 24 hours notice, but I've had this technique work for me in the past. You have to have a regular scheduled appointment that can be bumped up first though, for them to be able to have you on their cancellation list.
Trust me, I started out my career working for a private equity owned SNF/LTC. Those places are horrifically terrible and should be outlawed.
And your particular issue with this individual nurse isn't really because they're agency. We have that kind of problem with full time regular nurses in our hospital being unprofessional children. But also our hospital corporation likes to play on our compassion to exploit us when in reality, that grandmother sitting in her feces is their fault for refusing to staff our fucking hospital properly.
Bullshit
I'm born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.
I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I've never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.
OP, you need to learn what a redneck is.
Saline inventory is not tracked. Saline bags for use as IV fluids are scanned and tracked because they are ordered by a doctor and considered equivalent with administering a medication. But we also use those bags all the time for things that aren't tracked like priming tubing for "piggyback" administration of something that is ordered with the nearly full bag thrown away at the end, never scanned or tracked. And saline flushes aren't tracked.
There's ample supply of saline that would never be missed in the quantities that would have been used here. There is zero reasoning for using tap water instead of saline.
Lmao, I'm your age and literally inhaled a bag of Werther's while I had Covid because Paxlovid tastes so bad. And I'm about to buy a cane for those days when it would be very helpful to make my invisible disability more visible to all those people trying to rush around me in the grocery store. I old.