Why are Nurses at Vanderbilt Medical Center Cleaning Bathrooms?

[Teamster Jeff]

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Hospital budget cuts became viscerally visible earlier this month when Vanderbilt Medical Center announced that nurses must now perform housekeeping duties - cleaning patients' rooms and bathrooms.

It is hard to think of a worse way to demoralize professionals who want to practice at the top of their license. Invoking Florence Nightingale's name as a spoonful of sugar to help the budget medicine go down is no salve for deep wounds of disrespect.

For patients, they are at greater risk, an inevitable outcome as nurses spend less time at the bedside.

All of this begs the question, "Where does all the money go in hospitals, who is getting it, and what are they really doing with it?"

The direction of the budget axe is being determined by an unspoken battle between labor and capital.

Nurses, pharmacists, housekeepers and increasingly, doctors, are employed labor.

Medical equipment and supplies, medical devices, drugs, computers and information technology are the products of capital investment. Companies that manufacture these products need constantly increasing revenue to keep stock prices and earnings per share headed north. Stockholders and other investors - their unforgiving owners - demand bigger, better, quicker returns.

Consequently, companies are programmed to take more money for themselves, which leaves less for everyone else, especially nurses. I wrote about the uncanny parallels between the health care industry and the banking sector in Battle Over Health Care: What Obama's Reform Means for America's Future. Both have price bubbles, toxic assets, too-big-to-fail syndrome, and privatized gains and socialized losses.
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http://portside.org/2013-09-30/why-are-nurses-vanderbilt-medical-center-cleaning-bathrooms-health-cares-fight-between

[Warpy]

1. They've always tried to cut the budget on the backs of nurses

and it always results in workplace injuries, worse patient outcomes as nurses are taken away from being nurses, and higher infection rates as a rushed nurse just doesn't have the time to do the thorough job a housekeeping person would do.

JAHCO will likely threaten their accreditation over this one, it's egregious.

[Teamster Jeff]

3. Vanderbilt Medical Center has some legal problems too

They are being sued for being in violation of the Family Medical leave Act. Also, they are being sued for Medicare fraud. Lowlifes in management are bringing that place down.

[Warpy]

6. Too bad, it used to be top notch

before a bunch of b-school grads stuffed full of Jack Welch's management ideas got hired to make it more profitable.

[likesmountains 52]

2. I'll bet the CEO of the company I work for is salivating

over this What more can they dump on nurses?

[Squinch]

4. I fervently hope the nurses are refusing.

[mountain grammy]

5. Corporate hospitals, corporate medicine, the money's at the top, as usual.

Free markets! Thirty years, we've got it "right." Thanks, Ronald Reagan.

[Scuba]

7. Incredibly stupid to use nursing labor to perform housekeeping tasks. That just runs up costs.