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Welcome to Insights in Nursing Episode 34

1 in 3 People to Encounter A Mistake During Hospital Stays

The discussion starts off with a research about how mistakes are common in US hospitals. Anne’s thought of this was whether the data has actually been better collected or if health professionals are just making more errors now as compared to the past. Terri brought up some points in the article where MRSA was called a medical error which is not usually the case. Another thing is the cut made by Medicare on the medication time as compared before when nurses are given a grace period of one hour before or from the time the medication is scheduled. Being a nurse researcher herself, Terri says that medical errors have been looked at for the past 10 years and says that we have gotten better and lived though medical errors ourselves. The podmedic also thought that the reports may seem to have stretched the term medical errors since some of those mentioned are more like adverse events where an unintended complication arises which may or may not be a result of an error.

Better Work Conditions and Staffing Improves Patient Care… Well, Duh?

The next article was a report on the study that revealed better work conditions and better staffing result to improved patient care and tougher work schedules deteriorated patient outcomes. The podmedic pointed out that though the cause of some of the problems has been identified, it still comes down to staffing problems. Terri was pleased with the fact that this article not only looked at staffing as a problem but the psychological stress that nurses go through. It’s not just about how many nurses are on the floor but how they’re running the floor and what are asked of the nurses to be done. Anne pointed out that long shifts or long hours of work also contributes to stress especially when the emergency cases come in the last hour of the nurse’s shift where the nurse is already beat. Terri agreed to this and added that the fact that nurses are not given the time to stay away from their jobs for long because of under staffing and in the end costs hospitals more because of poor patient outcomes.

NLN Nursing School Survey Released

This article talks about the annual survey conducted by the NLN in nursing schools in the US and looks at a variety of things like the availability of educational resources, demographics of students, and looks at the potential future nursing workforce. The podmedic connected this with the previous article where if hospitals are understaffed, schools are too and the availability of nurse educators may be lacking. In the previous episodes of Insights in Nursing, some of Terri’s students came in as panelists and talked about some of the key points in the IOM report. The panelists move on to talk about how the curriculum of nursing education and lab training  has changed from the time when they were the ones in nursing school and more.

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Join us!

On the panel this week:

Terri Polick of Nurse Ratched’s Place and on Twitter @motherjonesRN.

Anne Robinson,novice podcaster, SM Nurse, Exec Producer for ProMed Network, Twitter@caringanne

and host Jamie Davis, the Podmedic, RN, NREMTP, BA, AAS managing director of the ProMed Network and host of the Nursing Showand MedicCast weekly programs.

Join us as we delve in to our week’s topic.

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Links from the Topic:

Mistakes Common in U.S. Hospitals

‘Troubling Trends’ Revealed: Tough Demands on Nurses Adversely Affect Patients

NLN Releases Annual Survey of Schools of Nursing 2009-2010

Contact Insights in Nursing

Do you have a question or a comment for our nurse panelists for this or any other episode of Insights in Nursing? Email us at InsightsInNursing@GMail.comwith your comments on this episode, suggestions for the show or future episodes or just to tell about what you think is important right now for you as a nurse!

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