New division creates caregiving team
New division creates caregiving team
A California hospital has created a new division to back up its assertion that attending to a patients’ mental well-being is as important to the healing process as attending to the physical recovery.
City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, CA, which specializes in the treatment of chronic disease, announced it will form a Division of Supportive Care Services targeting a patients’ psychosocial needs. The new division will hold the same status as the two existing divisions of surgery and medicine.
The new division will create a multidisciplinary caregiving team of psychologists, social workers, spiritual advisors, and physical therapists, among other specialties.
"We believe healing goes far beyond the medical sciences and includes the psychological, social, religious, and culturally diverse aspects of the individual," says Charles M. Balch, MD, president and chief executive officer of City of Hope. "All these factors can effect the recovery process. There is no profit in curing the body if in the process we destroy the soul." n
Shindul-Rothschild J. Where have all the nurses gone? Final results of our patient care survey. Am J Nurs 1996; 11:25-39.
The growing trend of replacing RNs with unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP) may be jeopardizing patient care, say the majority of respondents to a survey of nurses’ perceptions of the quality of patient care in their hospitals.
Of the 7,560 respondents, 85% report that the growing use of UAPs has not benefited patient care. The nurses told anecdotes to back up their responses. One nurse reported an instance of a UAP disconnecting an intravenous line while changing a patient’s gown, causing the patient to lose a large amount of blood before the tubing could be clamped.
The survey, commissioned by American Journal of Nursing with the help of the American Nurses Association (ANA) in Washington, DC, questioned nurses nationwide about their work environments and the impact of cost-saving and restructuring initiatives on patient care and the nursing profession.
The survey asked nurses about the use of UAPs, staffing ratios, time spent providing direct patient care, and RN retention rates, among other issues. The survey’s margin of error is less than 2% due to its large sample size.
The survey is the first to report of the widespread labor trend in the nursing field known as speed-up. Speed-up is a combination of a reduction in employees ursing staff and an increase in workload patients that results in the expectation of employees to work harder and be more efficient than they were before staffing reductions.
The ANA plans to use the survey to fuel its Every Patient Deserves a Nurse campaign, says Sara Foer, spokeswoman for the ANA. The campaign, which attacks the use of UAPs, informs the public about restructuring trends and advocates laws mandating minimum RN staffing levels.
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