LogFAQs > #966884532

I don't know how true it is that the girl bullies from high school become nurses as a way of abusing the power that they grew up having, but I've always thought that with conservative governments cutting funding to healthcare in general - let alone aged care and disabled care, where participants are reliant on the care for the rest of their life - has led to a ramshackle state of the industry where underpaid nurses who give a shit and are trying to do good within their abilities and best intentions are getting shoved out of the industry, and the people who callous over and stop treating patients as people are the ones who remain. And I'm quick to harp on America for being a shithole, but it's very much an Australian problem too and I would imagine it goes way further than that.

I had a friend who worked at an aged care facility. She was punched in the head by one of the patients - might have been the dementia ward. She got to sit down for five minutes before she went back to work. They didn't fill out an incident report, they didn't check to see if she had a concussion. They had her sit down for five minutes after getting punched in the head, and then they sent her back to work.

I work with another guy who stopped working in aged care last year. He's a dickhead, but he corroborated that the aged care industry is a rort and that there's institutional abuse going up to the top. There's no money to pay nurses a fair wage, there are no resources to help them do their job or to look out for their own wellbeing when they are put in danger. And that's not because all of the money is going to the patients, because these organisations are treating an ever burgeoning ageing population on a shoestring budget.

One last anecdotal story - a few years ago now, my town had a major blackout. We have an ex-serviceman's club, there's a cafe and a bar and a bistro and slot machines and shit. When all the power in town went down, they were able to keep their lights on. The club had an auxillary generator that meant they could keep operaring - and with all the power out in town, a lot of people were flocking to the club.

Our aged care facilities and our hospital? No auxillary generator. That sounds bad enough when you have a bunch of old people at the end of their life sitting in the dark with no air conditioning for upwards of eight hours - but there's also life support systems to consider, and some elderly patients required a constantly running air mattress due to bedsores and other ailments. When the power went out, those beds deflated and those patients had to lie on the floor in the dark. We have money to keep a pub and a bistro open, but we can't invest in the same technology to help the sick and the elderly.

So you have career nurses who stay with the job despite being paid for less than what they're worth, only because they've forced themselves to callous over and become a less empathetic and kind person to cope with the misery of the job, or because they like the thrill of the power they're authorised to wield. The people who want to make a difference have no support. When they get attacked by a patient, there's no support. They don't even get taken care of properly, not even through the official procedures that are meant to protect them. So understandably, they leave.

People who don't care about the patients are more prevalent when you're not putting in the money for equipment, training or proper care. And the people who are left, the callous ones and the abusive ones, are the ones who get promoted and make the industry worse for new nurses and for patients. It's a fucked up state.of affairs.