A nurse is suing a South Charleston hospital claiming she was forced to get a flu shot or risk losing her job, even though she says she is severely allergic to the vaccine. Susan Dean says in a lawsuit filed last week in Kanawha County Circuit Court that she is now disabled because Herbert J. Thomas Memorial Hospital, her employer of more than 30 years, required her to prove she is allergic to the flu vaccine -- when staff there should have known. Dean's lawsuit asks that in addition to her being awarded damages, medical professionals be required to undergo training to deal with employees' allergic to the vaccine.
Washington state is receiving another $300,000 grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help the state's colleges and universities train more highly skilled nurses. The grants are targeting states such as Washington, where an aging population is putting more demand on health care providers and increasing the demand for more highly educated nurses. The program in Washington is overseen by the Washington Nursing Action Coalition, a group that comprises state medical professionals. The grant will be used to continue to fund programs that will make it possible for more people to earn advanced degrees, including practicing nurses seeking further education. The state received a similar $300,000 grant in 2012.
Union nurses at UMass Memorial Health Center and HealthAlliance Hospital issued a letter to hospital administrators this morning, urging administrators to meet over layoffs that nurses say have created unsafe patient conditions. The letter, hand-delivered after a press conference and rally in front of UMass Memorial's corporate offices, by nurses in the Massachusetts Nurses Association appeals to administrators to rescind staff cuts that have rippled throughout the financially struggling UMass Memorial system. "We nurses believe (the cuts) are degrading the quality and safety of care for every patient entering the UMass Memorial/Health Alliance system," nurses wrote in the letter to UMass Memorial CEO Eric Dickson.
Hospitals are freeing up nurses to do the one thing they often don't have enough time for: taking care of patients. Swamped with tasks such as hunting for supplies, tracking down medications, filling out paperwork at the nursing station and looking for missing test results, nurses may spend less than two hours of a 12-hour shift in direct patient care, studies show. But research has also found that the more time nurses spend at the bedside, the less likely patients are to suffer falls, infections and medication errors, and the more likely they will be satisfied with their care.
Despite predictions of an impending nurse shortage, the current number of working registered nurses has surpassed expectations in part due to the number of baby-boomer RNs delaying retirement, a study by the RAND Corp. found. The study, published online Wednesday by Health Affairs, notes that the RN workforce, rather than peaking in 2012 at 2.2 million – as the researchers predicted a decade ago – reached 2.7 million that year and has continued growing. The trend of nurses delaying retirement accounted for an extra 136,000 RNs in 2012, the study suggests. Shifts in retirement benefits and "economic uncertainty in general" could have contributed to their decisions to extend their careers, said David Auerbach, the study's primary author and a policy researcher at RAND.
Expanding the role of nurses in managing chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol could be an effective way to handle the shortage of primary care physicians, according to a new study. "The idea was to see if we could have nurses, who are the nation's largest healthcare workforce, assume additional roles which they already do in hospitals, but they don't necessarily do that much in outpatient settings," said lead author Ryan Shaw.