World Affairs

---

When I wrote "pre-Nursing" on the designated area of collegiate study, I thought I would have a shot at making the world a better place. I imagined myself taking care of people; as cliche as it sounds, I pictured myself "making a difference". Little did I recognize at that naive age that health care was just a gross picture of business.

Sure, health care does a wonderful job "pretending" to help people, but behind the scenes, its all a cover-up for how to protect your own license, making sure you follow ridiculous policies and regulations, instead of actually caring for a whole individual. I love how the higher-ups want you to treat residents as if the facility were their "home", when in reality, management slyly takes away all hope for a comfortable and safe environment for these people. They could care less about this policy or that regulation, but apparently, as health care workers, we shouldn't worry about that. Instead, we need to be focused on state guidelines and whether a state surveyor might embarrass us on our next survey.

Selfish motives, just how our world runs this day and age.

You know how you never want to attain a job at your favorite restaurant or retail store? You have this fear that you'll find out how they really prepare the food, or how pushy they are about profits; health care is like that but times three. It makes me sick to think how we have gotten so caught up in the wrong part, the paper part, of medically caring for people.

Believe it or not, one of the reasons I was fired from my first nursing job was because I was literally "spending too much time with the residents". How many times have I been thanked for calling the doc about a 54 pulse per protocol (when the patient has been lying in bed for 3 hours sleeping) or following up on my medicare documentation? Compared to how often I've been thanked for listening, kneeling down at eye level with another human being and talking about a new diagnosis and what it means for their future, or hearing a story from their past. We know nothing about what each of our residents have been through within their own journeys, which dreams they conquered or, sometimes, more importantly, which dreams they never got a shot at.

---

PLEASE ENCOURAGE AUTHOR BELOW LEAVE COMMENT ON ARTICLE