Numbers Do Not Lie

We have our eligibility review meeting next month with the state. Even though this is not the specific office that can help we are going to begin our final quest for help and advocacy with our nursing issue. In order to provide evidence of our claims we merely put together some simple numbers about our case thus far. For those that have doubted just how inadequate our claims of nursing really are we decided to illustrate and archive our nursing situation with these numbers. These stats were astounding, even to us. We had no idea things were this bad. Looking at it this way really puts a perspective on things. Here are the results since we began November 16, 2009 – May 21, 2010

 

• 189 days x 2 shifts per day (8 hours each) = 378 total shifts

Out of 378 shifts only 126 shifts have been covered (That is only 32% not even half ass!)

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• That is 3024 hours scheduled (27 weeks) only 970 have been used to date.

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• 1 Nurse scheduled 135 days has called out 27 times

that is an average of 5 call outs per month

That nurse’s schedule is Mon-Fri (5 days each week)

we lost an entire week on average per month

8 days the nurse worked 6 or less hours (arrived late/left early)

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The numbers do not lie. It paints the real picture, a very dismal one sadly. This is absolutely unacceptable yet there is no one to advocate for us at all. We are completely at the systems mercy and why? These numbers were obtained using the nursing time logs that are in Elias nursing book, so there is no way of obscuring the numbers. We simply counted and did the math. In light of the new situation with our nurse and her part-time position we intend to show these numbers to the nursing agency as well. You would think they would already be aware of this, but we’d be willing to bet they are not. When there is no nurse the agency does not get paid. Oh and by the way the nursing agency tells me they are not losing money on our case. What kind of business profit and loss models are they using? Are we the only case like this? Not likely!