HEALTHCARE AT THE PRECIPICE

The bottom line is MONEY! Health Care used to be about helping people to achieve and maintain an optimum level of physical, mental and spiritual health. Nurses, particularly, were taught from day one in nursing school, to look at the whole person and administer the highest quality of skilled nursing care, mixed with large doses of TLC (tender loving care, for those who have forgotten it did exist), all the while listening carefully and patiently to what the patient was saying about themselves and their illness. Treatments were rendered as ordered by a physician, but patients knew that someone actually cared about them as a person, not a diagnosis or source of revenue.

In today's money-driven Health Care System , the few nurses that remain to give the care, are grossly overworked and spread thin, with twice as many patients to attend to and very little ancillary help. They are often disrespected by their employers, and finding it physically impossible to render quality nursing care. Florence Nightingale would surely be appalled if she could see what has happened to her vision of loving care offered to the ill and weak by angels of mercy!

It is my hope that nurses and other health care professionals will be able to somehow stem the tide and turn us back from this precipice we are standing on. If we ( professionals and the public) don't start to say NO to the outrageous, unfeeling demands of managed care, cutbacks, and bottom-line medical economics, we are all doomed to go OVER THE EDGE. We, as a nation, have already slipped from being the healthiest nation on earth, to way down the list, below most other developed nations!!! How did we all let this happen?!

Please speak out and fight back and let's join together in an effort to restore the CARE in Health Care in America. This page is available to gather information and ideas, and as a barometer of public opinion. If you have any examples of your own experience, or suggestions for ways to correct the problems that exist in Health Care, please send them to me via E-mail at pennypit@yahoo.com (click below). If you don't have E-mail, Click here for a form. You can also click on the link below for the website of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Healthcare.(Click here for an article on this subject from the American Journal of Public Health) There you will find more information about the problems we are facing, such as the ever-increasing numbers of Americans who have no healthcare insurance at all. The committee is working hard to find answers to these troubling problems that we must face. It will take all of us working as a team to restore the quality of care that we all deserve. Thank you,