Nurses maliciously comply with cost-cutting manager causes hospital's doctors to quit.
Working in a hospital is hard, high-stakes work. Surgeons, Students, and, most importantly, nurses are all overworked to ensure the best care for their patients. That's why many get frustrated when the business side of healthcare gets in the way of patient care.
On a popular Reddit thread in the Malicious Compliance Subreddit, a group of nurses does exactly what their cost-cutting manager wants them to, much to the disdain of the rest of the hospital staff.
They write:
I work as a recovery room nurse, and our staffing is complicated. We have to be available to care for patients as they come out of surgery, whether they come out earlier or later than scheduled. This means we may have no patients for a while, but minutes later, they are all coming out from surgery at once, and there need to be enough RNs to care for an influx. We also have to take care of any patients in procedural areas that don’t wake up as well as predicted (endo, cath lab, etc), so the amount of patients that come to our unit is unpredictable.
On top of all that, our max RN to-patient ratio is 1:2, but often our standards are 1:1 according to our governing body. For example, if my patient has an advanced airway, I cannot be more than an arm's length away from them, which makes it impossible to care for a second patient.
Now onto the MC. We have yet another new manager who is out to wow the upper management with his amazing unit handling. He focuses on saving money by reducing our staffing and sending RNs home when we are 'overstaffed.' He has never done our type of nursing, and its frankly like talking to a brick wall when trying to explain it to him. He doesn’t understand the flow and why we can’t always have two patients.
We are flooded this one day with patients, but we are running on minimal staffing. We are a bunch of irritated women tired of our manager mansplaining to us about a job he’s never done. This is how you want to run the unit. Fine, but we are not compromising patient care. We stuck to our ratios, taking two patients when possible, but would not take a second patient when it wasn’t safe.
The surgeries don’t stop because there aren’t enough nurses, so guess who gets to hang out in the recovery room until a nurse is available? The anesthesiologists. They had to stay with their patient until a nurse could assume care, which pushed back surgeries all day. The anesthesiologists were pissed, not at us because they understand what it takes to recover a patient safely, but at the management for their cr*p staffing metrics.
The surgeons were pissed because their surgeries were getting pushed back later and later in the day. We are a small hospital and only do emergency surgeries with the call teams at night. Surgeries got pushed back so late that the OR and recovery room teams had to be called in to work through the night. We’re talking at least seven extra people on overtime for 10.5 hours.
The anesthesiologist on call had to work through the night, working for a total of about 24 hours straight. He was so pissed that the next week he went part-time. It was either quitting or part-time, so they accepted part-time.
Our hospital, like everywhere else, needs more healthcare workers, including anesthesiologists, so his working part-time forced the hospital to close one OR room until they could find another anesthesiologist because they could barely handle the rooms we had running already.
So with the brilliant move of saving the hospital a bit over $1K in a day by canceling a couple of nurses, the manager also angered a bunch of MDs and pissed off an anesthesiologist enough to go to part-time, which made an OR room unable to be staffed fully indefinitely. This little move costs the hospital tens of thousands of dollars daily in lost OR revenue, and surgeons can’t get enough OR times with us, so they are going to other hospitals, causing us to lose even more money. What’s even crazier is that the manager still has a job and still isn’t listening to us.
The internet is here for nurses.
ParkingOutside6500 says:
Children understand cause and effect. Why do managers have so much trouble?
JunkyFirstAidKit says:
Feel you! I work as a pediatric nurse on peripher station. We usually recommend angered patients to use our complaint-managenent and file a detailed complaint. No one ever listens to overtired, overworked shortstaffed nurses but I don't take the blame for poor management no more.
So it's usually like: 'I am very sorry for this unfortunate situations and understand your anger. But it is out of my control, we do our best but can only work with what we have. But you can file a official complaint, and maybe this will help to change some things in higher positions. Here is the formular.'
Dear Patients and parents, call sh*tty hospital management out! It's always on the backs of staff and patients. If management thinks they can get away with it, they will do it until they have to eat their bad decisions spiced with regret.
Icmedia says:
Story as old as time, upper management tasks middle management with cutting costs. Middle management isn't responsible for revenue, so they cut costs but end up losing the company loads of money, overall. But, since they were technically good at doing their one job (cutting costs), they face no repercussions and are sometimes even rewarded.
OP, whoever is runnig your hospital is doing a bad job. You should take over over for them.