Doctors are very important figures in shaping and maintaining the health of the United States and the world at large, and they deserve proper recognition. But what about nurses? These often-unsung heroes put in long hours and deal with some truly trying situations at work that would frustrate and exhaust even the most hardened individuals. From hospitals to correctional facilities and even cruise ships, RNs are everywhere and they’re constantly hard at work taking care of patients and putting themselves in potentially risky situations with infection, dangerous patients, and a whole myriad of circumstances.
Helping Nurses And Healthcare Companies With Proper Financing
In our humble opinion, every week should be nurse appreciation week, because we know that a few carefully placed, encouraging comments might go really far in making someone’s day. Now, at The Commercial Finance Group, we’re not nurses ourselves, but we are seasoned financial experts that provide crucial healthcare account receivables financing and accounts receivable factoring services that help solve even the trickiest of cash flow problems.
If your healthcare business is experience cash flow troubles because you’re waiting on payments from patients or vendors, get the working capital you need now to manage and grow your healthcare company. Learn more about our healthcare account receivables financing services.
Nurses As A Caretaker
At face value, dispensing medications doesn’t seem like it’s that difficult. However, when many hospitalized patients require more than a dozen different daily medications to be administered at various hours and in multiple ways (we’ll leave some of these administration routes up to your imagination), this seemingly simple task becomes rather taxing. While it’s true that physicians have the responsibility to put in order and ensure that their patients receive the appropriate daily medication throughout their hospital stay, nurses are the ones actually physically dispensing the medications, and often to multiple patients a day.
Combine administering medicine with providing verbal encouragement to patients, checking their vitals, helping them in and out of bed and doing a host of other caretaker responsibilities and what you have at the end of the day is the ultimate medical SuperMom or SuperDad.
Preventing Patients From Getting In Worse Condition
As if what we’ve covered so far isn’t enough to push nurses into constant overtime, it’s really incredible how much nursing care is required to keep patients from experiencing hospital-acquired adverse events such as staph infection. Things like veins clotting, pressure ulcer formations and weakening muscles are all potential side effects of a patient remaining in bed for too long, and someone need to prevent these things from occurring.
Again, queue the nurse. While it’s true that certain preventative medications can help reduce these conditions, it is the nurses on duty who routinely check patients for any of these signs of de-conditioning. After all, these patients are receiving specialized medical care to improve their condition, not worsen it. It’s pretty remarkable that patient care is only one facet of a nursing career, especially when you factor in other things like ensuring adequate nutrition, hydration, hygiene, and preparing patients for admission as well as discharge. There are many professions that involve long hours at work, and being a nurse is most certainly one of them.
Educating Patients
Nurses aren’t necessarily teachers, but they have studied long enough to teach patients many things. Any person can become a patient due to an accident or medical necessity, but only those who have been previously hospitalized know what to expect when being admitted to a medical center. Even just a few days at the hospital is far from a five-star hotel stay, and there is a unique schedule of events surrounding a hospitalized patient’s visitation that completely differs from a normal day outside. So, someone must properly educate the patient on what to expect while they’re in the hospital, and that’s usually the nurse on duty.
Nurses Do Things We Consider As “Gross”
It’s true. Do you really want to collect a stool sample, administer a suppository or play a game called “catch the vomit”? Of course not. Even something as seemingly simple as clipping or cleaning toenails (yes, nurses also do this) is pretty nasty if you think about it, especially if they aren’t your own.
Some nurses even have to go as far as preparing corpses depending on where they work, and yes, it’s definitely creepy. This occurs most often in ICU’s, but it could occur elsewhere. There’s also more to corpse handling than you probably imagined: from cleaning to manipulating, bagging and putting it on a stretcher to cart it down to the morgue, most people would rather wipe bottoms all day. We won’t continue going into overly grotesque detail about the less-than-favorable things that nurses do every single day around the world, but when people say things like “I couldn’t possibly be able to do what you do as a nurse,” they’re absolutely right.
Balancing Never-Ending Challenges
Nurses face a series of constant on-the-job challenges (not to mention the stress of patient memories off-the-job, too) that usually involve things like ridiculously long hours, multitasking, perpetual stress, and even the risk of injury. As far as multitasking goes for nurses, they deal with constant interruptions – on average, nurses are interrupted 10-14 times an hour, and they also spend about 34 percent of their time juggling several tasks at the same time.
We mentioned the risk of injury, and it’s a completely valid concern for nurses. The risk of injury for nurses stems from things like having to perform repetitive movements, lifting patients up and setting them back down on hospital beds, and standing for very long periods of time – talk about the need for a great pair of cushioned shoes. In a study that compared 98 different jobs, registered nurses actually ranked fifth for work-related injuries, which is certainly something that would stress us out as nurses. That brings us to stress – from the frustration of a patient’s’ condition not improving to the potential for costly errors when working directly with (and on) people, the inherent demands of nursing can lead to high levels of stress. Some RNs or nurses in training actually leave the field not because they weren’t competent at their job or they were disgusted by the nature of their work, but because the stress was simply too much to bear.
The Commercial Finance Group Supports Our Fellow Nurses Out There
We do what we do best by providing healthcare accounts receivable financing solutions and healthcare cash flow fixes at our Burbank and Atlanta locations. We also remotely finance healthcare companies across the country. Thank you again to all the nurses out there!
