Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Medical Whistle Blowing Retaliation

As a shortage of medical staff, particularly nurses, spreads rapidly throughout the medical field medical personnel are facing another dilemma. With staff being pushed into unsafe areas of practice managing more patients and tasks than is considered safe by those in the industry they are finding themselves faced with acts of retaliation for speaking up. Acts of retaliation include harassment and discipline of unfair nature and termination of employment with previous employers putting them down as “no re-hire” and portraying them negatively, which leaves them with no reference from the previous employer. In the medical field new prospects of employment are now requiring that you supply them with two professional references of management. By doing this, they slip right by the law that protects you stating that they can only obtain dates of employment. In order to obtain a future job, you must supply them with signatures to bypass this protection giving them written permission to speak to your previous managers. If you have left due to poor working conditions and in disagreement of management practices, you become the bad guy, as management can do no wrong. What they say is gospel.

There is money and power behind these large institutions that have lawyers retained for services to help them in their efforts to tarnish previous employees. Most employees do not have the resources and money to defend them. In the field of nursing alone, there are over 330,000 licensed inactive nurses and statistics show that over 50% of them have left the field due to working conditions and poor staffing models. There isn’t much information to back up how many nurses are out of practice due to retaliation of speaking up about such poor conditions that jeopardizes patient safety.

Found on the Internet is an organization called “LEAP For Patient Safety.” They have started a petition for doctors due to this unfair behavior of hospitals. They state in there petition: “The Health Care Quality Improvement Act is abused by hospitals and permits hospitals to discipline and terminate physicians who complain about poor quality of care. The Health Care Quality Improvement Act removes Physician Due Process Rights. Physicians are unable to successfully contest a retaliatory hospital disciplinary process or termination.” At the present time there is no petition that strictly addresses whistleblowing protection for nurses. There is a petition that includes it along with a demand for legislation to address unsafe nurse to patient ratios. Unfortunately, the hospitals and big corporations are backed by money and have no accountability to the public, their patients and their employees. They get away with unfair termination of employees and negative records in the personnel files because there is little that most people can do once they have become a victim to this.

The people who suffer the most by this abusive power are the patients. “LEAP” also lists their top ten reasons hospital administrators abuse patients by cutting costs and avoid spending money which you can find on their site: http://leapforpatientsafety.org/

Standing up for patient safety and appropriate staffing conditions for medical personnel is not an easy battle. There are multiple organizations out there that are trying to get the word out and educate the public. Many different nursing organizations try to gather nurses and other people to stand together and address these issues with government agencies. Unfortunately, each organization alone has not been able to come up with enough people to be heard. Since each and every organization is fighting for the same cause, they need to join together for the sake of the patients. There are multiple petitions and organizations out there. While it can be frustrating to continue to hear of this problem over and over and be approached by different organizations and different forms of the issue, the only way that we will ever see any changes is if people make the commitment to continue to sign petitions and make their voices heard. Speak up about the problem and sign petitions. If we all get tired of signing petitions the corporations will win another battle based on power and money. It seems that the cause is substantial enough that just knowing that there are over 500,000 deaths yearly from medical errors that it would provoke a change. This is not the case. This is election year and this is the best time to push politicians into understanding what you want for our country. Safe patient care should be an expectation. It should be criminal for institutions to deliberately staff their facilities knowing that patient care is jeopardized and lives are at risk.

Please do not give up. Sign petitions and pass the word on. Don’t wait until something happens to you or someone in your family to become aggravated and act on this issue. That is TOO LATE. There have already been way too many medical errors due to selfish profits and unsafe conditions.

Educate yourself with The Value of the Human Life

If you are someone who has been affected by retaliation for speaking up, please take the poll in the left sidebar. Also…..sign these two petitions:

http://www.petitiononline.com/nurse/petition.html
http://leapforpatientsafety.org/ (link to petition at site)

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