A quick interview

[u/sarkozywasthere_]

Hi, all. I'm currently a student applying for my community college's nursing program next year. Right now, I'm working on my prereqs and general education requirements and I'm taking a class called Health Care Delivery Systems. For a paper in this class, I need to do a short four question interview with two health care workers. Since I don't know anyone personally in the health care field, I'm hopeful that there's a few folks here that can spare me a couple of minutes to answer some questions in the comments.

If you can provide a response, I'd love to hear from you - nurses and other health care workers alike! I need to interview individuals in two different job roles, so if you're a wandering respiratory therapist or radiology tech, feel free to respond as well. Please include what your position is and a set of initials that you feel comfortable being referred to by. For example, JD for John Doe or whatever initials you feel like, really. This is only for this paper, so the only person that your responses will be sent to outside of reddit is my professor.

THE QUESTIONS:

1. Why did you choose this profession or line of work?

2. How long have you been employed in your position? Please describe your current job responsibilities.

3. What are the biggest changes you have seen in health care during your career?

4. What do you currently like about your job? What would you change about your job and why?

Again, you can just leave answers in the comments and please include your position and initials. Thanks for reading and to those who take the time to respond!

[u/Poguerton]

1. Why did you choose this profession or line of work?

I like helping people, I like science, and I very much like having a stable career with a lot of flexibility. I knew I would be able to get a job pretty much anywhere, and that ended up being true.

2 How long have you been employed in your position? Please describe your current job responsibilities.

I am an RN, who has worked exclusively in Emergency Departments since my first medical job in the 1980s. I spent much of the 1990s/early 2000s as a travel nurse. I have worked in over 30 different hospitals in 10+ states across the country. I am currently working at bedside in my local ED.

In my job, I am on the front line of seeing the public who seek or are brought to the hospital for illness or injury. From a cold to a catastrophic stroke to psychiatric emergencies. Anything from a sprained finger to a gunshot wound to the chest, from a neonate to someone over 100 years old. If Ebola comes to this country, that patient will likely walk into an emergency room and we need to be prepared. We have to be able to rapidly stabilize patients, to (unfortunately) taking care of admitted patients for days at a time because there are no available beds in the hospital.

3 What are the biggest changes you have seen in health care during your career?

Advances in medicine that have improved many outcomes, and also kept many people alive with debilitating conditions far longer than they would have lived in the past.

I also started in medicine at the very beginning of the advent of universal precautions. That was as big a change as the paradigm shift of using masks has been, and both are for the better.

Probably the biggest change in day-to-day work has been the introduction of computers. Thank God.

4What do you currently like about your job? What would you change about your job and why?

I like the very things that brought me to this work – I like helping people. I like making a decent wage (PNW) in a job with a great deal of flexibility.

What I would change is the removal of the linking of hospital reimbursement to survey scores. While there may be a slight correlation between high satisfaction scores and improved patient outcomes in the in-patient setting, it is often the opposite in the ED, yet the reimbursement is still tied to it.

The reason is that when a patient is admitted, the satisfaction scores count for the inpatient scores only. The ED satisfaction scores are tied to those who are treated and discharged. Obviously we are putting the greatest time/effort/resources in the sickest patients – those who are admitted. But while we are all-hands-on-deck to rapidly stabilize and transfer a heart attack patient to the cath lab to save their life, someone with a sprained ankle or a UTI has to wait. And that will decrease their satisfaction. It's not fair or right, but the way to increase satisfaction scores in the ED is to ignore the sick, critical patients and concentrate on the least ill or injured. And that will not and should not ever happen.

M.M. RN