Lawyers And Medicine

I was going to blog on this last night, but we instead went out to dinner with my sister to see her off before she left for Texas this morning. If you're ever in the Orlando area and are looking for a nice, but somewhat pricey meal with excellent food, atmosphere and wait staff, try Seasons 52 on Sand Lake Road, just west of International Drive. Well worth it. But I'm digressing already.

While I was at work yesterday, a commercial came on the radio from one of the local ambulance chasing firms which said, in essesence, "There aren't enough nurses in Florida" - a true statement - so "let's force doctors and hospitals to hire more nurses, pay them better, and reduce mandatory overtime." Followed by the usual "If you believe a loved one has been hurt do to a lack of skilled nursing staff, call us and we'll sue the crap out of whoever you want." (All of the phrases in quotes are paraphrased, by me, and are not direct quotes. The quotation marks are merely being used to highlight the gist of their message.)

Now doesn't that just sounds all nice and altruistic. The lawyers are now sticking up for the nurses and are going to force the big, bad, hospitals and doctors to hire more nurses, to give them all raises, and to cut back their hours. Nursing understaffing is a problem. This sounds great, using the legal system to correct an obvious wrong. What could be wrong with that?

The basic premise is what's wrong with it. The law firm is working on the assumption that there are a sufficient number of qualified nurses out there and that they simply aren't being hired in proper numbers. But that's not the case.

There is a real nursing shortage. We simply have more openings than there are qualified nurses to fill. And it's not as if the educational system around here is lacking for candidates either. The waiting list to get into some of the nursing programs can be as long as two years (known from personal experience with trying to get my other half into one). Some of the hospitals around here want so badly to hire more RNs that they even go as far as to pay for all the schooling on he understanding that you work for them for two years after becoming registered. They even hire you into another job in the hospital during your schooling. The problem here is not a lack of desire to hire on the part of the medical profession.

The problem here is twofold. One, there simply isn't enough capacity in the educational system to get more people through. The system is working at capacity, training nurses as fast as it possibly can. And two, there are a certain number of potentially excellent candidates, I don't know how many, who are turned off and scared away from even considering a career in the medical field, as either a doctor or a nurse, by the excessive litigation of the field.

If the ambulence chasers succeed in their quest to begin suing the medical profession for a lack of nurses, I fear that they will only succeed, not in improving the quality of care, but rather in diminishing the quality.

Smaller practices and hospitals that cannot afford to compete with the big players for talent will losing their nursing staffs and will be forced to close. The remaining facilities will be fully staffed, yes, but they will be far fewer in number and the wait, already outrageous, will become even more so. As more hospitals close, ambulences will have to travel farther to get their patients to care - a dangerous situation where every minute can count so much.

As the timeliness of the care declines, and as more people suffer the effects, the lawyers will of course then turn their sights to the closings and shrinkage of the medical profession as their new boogieman to explain why they should be be suing the hospitals.

Which brings us around full circle to the real motive behind the lawyer's great alrtuistic desire to help the nurses. They simply are looking for a way to go after the hospitals and their malpractice insurers as they still have the deepest pockets around.

In the end, they are creating a self-perpetuating cycle. There are too few nurses; there are two few facilities. Until we simply get more nursing students educated and in the system, there is no simple solution and certainly none that can be imposed by the courts.

The lawyers will simply raise the cost of health care even more, pricing more people out of the market. I know a little about on of the partners in this particular firm, he tries to play kingmaker in Florida politics, so I can certainly believe that he is fully accepting of the stratosphereic rise in the cost of health care, as it would bring us one step closer to realizing the dream of HillaryCare.

And then the lawyers would have access to the deepest pockets of all - the taxpayers.