joe posts

I’ve read about the huge prison industry in the United States, but I was surprised to hear that now the judges have gotten in on the action.

Two US judges charged with taking more than $2m (£1.4m) in kickbacks from a privately-run detention centre have pleaded guilty to fraud.

Prosecutors say Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took the money in return for giving young offenders long sentences to serve in the centre. – BBC

Fraud?! That’s just product promotion! This wise investor had a captive audience. Poor kids:

A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences.

Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.

Get Tough on Crime! Make Millions!

So I’m reading a news story about American hospitals and their struggles to retain nurses. It’s a struggle almost everywhere, for sure – to call it an extremely stressful job doesn’t really do it justice. And in Ontario, thanks to two decades of neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, things are imploding. Cutbacks in the hospitals in the 1990s meant a decline in quality of care and poor working environments for professionals, and cutbacks to education have raised tuition costs and have made it difficult to attract new people to the field. It costs at least $25,000 to study to be a nurse, and there’s about a 1/4 odds that your $25,000 degree will be useless a year after graduation and you’ll be working in a warehouse, self-medicating for job-related PTSD. ( But I digress!) Add the baby boomer retirement schedule… and you get the picture.

So I’m reading this article and I had to laugh because AMERICAN HOSPITALS can’t keep nurses! AMERICAN HOSPITALS! What they’re trying to do is introduce a residency-style program for new nurses. I have to say it makes sense. Emphasis mine!:

The Versant plan pairs new nurses with more experienced nurses and they share patients. At first, the veterans do the bulk of the work as the rookies watch; by the end of the 18-week training program, those roles are reversed.

The new nurses must complete a 60-item checklist. They must learn how to put in an IV line and urinary catheter; interpret different heart rhythms and know how to treat them; monitor patients on suicide watch and do hourly checkups on very critically ill patients; know how to do a head-to-toe physical assessment on a patient, as well as how to inform families about the condition of their loved one.

For Yaima Milian, who’s currently in the program at Baptist, this is markedly different from the preparation she got at her first hospital in New Jersey. She left after a six-week orientation because she didn’t feel ready to work solo. – AP

18 weeks. Four and a half months. And the nurse mentioned left after a six-week orientation program at a hospital in New Jersey. I can believe it. I would say two month minimum. A nurse might have the skills, but every floor is different and requires a whole lot of learning.

My orientation at the Sudbury Regional Hospital lasted three days. And they weren’t 12 hour days, they were 8 hour days, as I recall. At the end of the three days, I told them I was wholly unprepared, so they generously extended it for another six days or so. I quit after a few months – just couldn’t handle it.

Suddenly I feel less guilty about leaving the profession. No wonder I felt unprepared – it wasn’t even a cushy American hospital (I’m kidding about that America, don’t worry, I know your hospitals aren’t that cushy, unless they don’t allow poor people in). I think a residency-style program would work wonders for retention – unfortunately it’s that kind of creative thinking that our political parties despise. Sounds like it would cost tax-dollars, doesn’t it? That might make it hard to cut taxes and raise MP pay again.

Private healthcare, here we come.