Nursing staff shortages go back to at least the early 1980’s. It’s a disgrace when the people who provide the majority of patient care are treated like a commodity instead of being fully appreciated and well paid with humane and safe working conditions.
If we also had a priority to encourage the immigration of qualified medical professionals, that would ease some of these shortages as you have noted in another of your posts.
BTW, I like to write my own letters to have maximum impact with requests to electeds. I did so today and had quite an adventure using RESISTBOT. Its responses to my attempts to customize my letter were delayed and were one step behind what I was trying to do, so I went to each federal elected’s site and posted my own request.
Here’s what I tried to do. to create your own letter, you can now enter MANUAL to write your own. If your letter is longer than the 150 character messaging limit, you can send multiple messages and then separately send a message DONE to RESISTBOT. I hope my letter got delivered. RESISTBOT tells you to not include a salutation or signature because it handles that. RESISTBOT also volunteers to write a letter via AI if anyone wants to try that in this brave new world. RESISTBOT also offers a SWITCH command to direct you to other apps it uses to send long letters. That command did not work when I tried it.
Here was the letter I sent:
I'm a constituent who worked in healthcare as a psychologist, a post-doc resident and a medical transcriptionist/receptionist. Recently I have been a patient in hospital and in emergency departments dealing with cardiac arrhythmia issues.
Through friends who are nurses, I've been aware since the 1980's that nurse staffing levels have been sufficiently low that nurses feel afraid of making medical mistakes because they have too many patients and are asked to take too much overtime. With an increasing shortage of healthcare professionals, our healthcare system is fraying and at times falls apart, causing unnecessary deaths and complications for patients, very long waits for access to care that can also be deadly, and burnout among staff. Nurses are but shouldn't be second class citizens in the healthcare environment. And it is getting worse as private equity hollows out healthcare practices, hospitals and other facilities to funnel the money to "investors." Enough.
I'm writing to urge you to the Nurse Staffing Standards for Hospital Patient Safety and Quality Care Act, aka HR 3421 and S. 1113. I also want to urge you to do whatever you can to increase the training of healthcare professionals and to streamline the ability of qualified healthcare people to immigrate to this country and help save us from our own short-sightedness. Eventually, I am a supporter of Medicare for All because our healthcare system costs us way too much for poorer outcomes compared to other countries that have implemented universal healthcare. Yes, their implementations are imperfect, but they're a great place to start.
Wow Gary. Thank you. This is tremendous. I'm glad you were able to make the manual command work. Thank you. I recall a time not too long ago that there was a program to pick up nurses from the Phillipines. I will look into that.
Alan, unfortunately I was not able to make the manual command work well enough. It looks like resistbot is working out its new features. And just to make things more complicated, I tried all of this via the Apple messaging app on my computer instead of by phone. We live in the Tower of Babel!
As noted in my LONG post, I did send the letter to my federal electeds. I also used your RESISTBOT message as is to send to my state representatives.
Done!✅ Thanks for the support of our overworked and under-appreciated nurses, by far the largest % of the health care professions. Remember: The life you save could be your own. 👍🏼
Nursing staff shortages go back to at least the early 1980’s. It’s a disgrace when the people who provide the majority of patient care are treated like a commodity instead of being fully appreciated and well paid with humane and safe working conditions.
If we also had a priority to encourage the immigration of qualified medical professionals, that would ease some of these shortages as you have noted in another of your posts.
BTW, I like to write my own letters to have maximum impact with requests to electeds. I did so today and had quite an adventure using RESISTBOT. Its responses to my attempts to customize my letter were delayed and were one step behind what I was trying to do, so I went to each federal elected’s site and posted my own request.
Here’s what I tried to do. to create your own letter, you can now enter MANUAL to write your own. If your letter is longer than the 150 character messaging limit, you can send multiple messages and then separately send a message DONE to RESISTBOT. I hope my letter got delivered. RESISTBOT tells you to not include a salutation or signature because it handles that. RESISTBOT also volunteers to write a letter via AI if anyone wants to try that in this brave new world. RESISTBOT also offers a SWITCH command to direct you to other apps it uses to send long letters. That command did not work when I tried it.
Here was the letter I sent:
I'm a constituent who worked in healthcare as a psychologist, a post-doc resident and a medical transcriptionist/receptionist. Recently I have been a patient in hospital and in emergency departments dealing with cardiac arrhythmia issues.
Through friends who are nurses, I've been aware since the 1980's that nurse staffing levels have been sufficiently low that nurses feel afraid of making medical mistakes because they have too many patients and are asked to take too much overtime. With an increasing shortage of healthcare professionals, our healthcare system is fraying and at times falls apart, causing unnecessary deaths and complications for patients, very long waits for access to care that can also be deadly, and burnout among staff. Nurses are but shouldn't be second class citizens in the healthcare environment. And it is getting worse as private equity hollows out healthcare practices, hospitals and other facilities to funnel the money to "investors." Enough.
I'm writing to urge you to the Nurse Staffing Standards for Hospital Patient Safety and Quality Care Act, aka HR 3421 and S. 1113. I also want to urge you to do whatever you can to increase the training of healthcare professionals and to streamline the ability of qualified healthcare people to immigrate to this country and help save us from our own short-sightedness. Eventually, I am a supporter of Medicare for All because our healthcare system costs us way too much for poorer outcomes compared to other countries that have implemented universal healthcare. Yes, their implementations are imperfect, but they're a great place to start.
Wow Gary. Thank you. This is tremendous. I'm glad you were able to make the manual command work. Thank you. I recall a time not too long ago that there was a program to pick up nurses from the Phillipines. I will look into that.
Alan, unfortunately I was not able to make the manual command work well enough. It looks like resistbot is working out its new features. And just to make things more complicated, I tried all of this via the Apple messaging app on my computer instead of by phone. We live in the Tower of Babel!
As noted in my LONG post, I did send the letter to my federal electeds. I also used your RESISTBOT message as is to send to my state representatives.
Done!✅ Thanks for the support of our overworked and under-appreciated nurses, by far the largest % of the health care professions. Remember: The life you save could be your own. 👍🏼