Friday, February 22, 2008

Messy Things

I've seen unpleasant news items lately. Like the one about ten nurses, recruited from the Philippines to work at a care home, who all quit on the same day. The reasons cited by the nurses for quitting was extreme work loads, being called in constantly, at a dangerously understaffed nursing home. So what happens? The nurses may end up in jail. They are being charged with crimes like endangering the health of a child. This is a scarey precedent.

The spokesperson of the ten claim they were exhausted from long shifts and no days off and that they made repeated efforts with the management asking that they hire more staff. They claimed staff were poorly trained, too.

During my college days I tried to keep up with bills by working at nursing homes. I worked at the Mennonite Home in Albany for awhile. I specifically told them I was a college student and gave them the maximum number of hours I could work a week. But, I was a responsible person, who showed up at work when I said I would. Many nurses aids they had hired would not show up on time or at all. They would constantly call me to work, even when I had classes scheduled and they would threaten to fire me if I didn't come in. The Mennonite Home job was one factor that led to my downfall in college. Exhaustion. Total utter exhaustion trying to maintain a job to pay bills and take a full load of classes. They just didn't care there, about how badly they exploited an employee or breaking promises they had made.

Later on, I worked at Corvallis Manor, the night shift. This would be the end of my nurses aid career. It was horrible. They would routinely have only two aides on the swing or night shift and often not even a laundry aide. Often there would be no adult diapers available and no laundry aide doing sheets. This is extremely important in a nursing home where residents are incontinent and constantly pooping or peeing without ability to control bowels or bladdar.

It was sad beyond my ability to handle. The job is physically and emotionally demanding. It pays almost nothing. You're cleaning up human feces and urine and dealing with people who are angry or sad or desperately lonely or dying or all these things. Chronic understaffing is the norm. Demands on the low level employees are extreme and if anything goes haywire, the low level employees get the brunt. There is no support system in place for employees engaged in such a demanding low pay job, who, because of the low pay, are likely facing extreme pressures at home.

I ran into a caregiver recently. The stories of her job, that she would tell matter of factly, were eye popping. She once cared for an extremely obese patient who hadn't been out of bed in years due to extreme obesity now coupled with diabetes. The woman would also call her routinely after her shift was supposed to be over, because the woman was lonely. She did not get paid for these multiple calls, taking up her time after work. Or the woman would call her to say she'd had diarrhea and needed cleaning up, but after hours and the woman would go do it, even though she was not paid to.

She was paid under $10 per hour. When the woman she cared for would become so ill she would end up in the hospital, she would not go to work or be paid until the woman got out of the hospital. So this woman's financial status was always on the edge of collapse with such a job.

This is no easy job. Caregivers often are asked to do things that nurses should be doing, like catheterizing and treating bed sores. They also clean up feces and urine and house keep and cook and provide often the only counselling/friendship their client gets--all for almost nothing. Their clients are sometimes so angry they are verbally abusive to caregivers and extremely difficult to deal with. They work for agencies, usually, and sometimes for the state but as private contractors, meaning the state paid caretakers have to keep track of income and pay their own taxes. This has gotten so many of them into deep trouble with the IRS. The pay is so low many do not save up the taxes they need to pay or even know anything about taxes. The work is sporadic and sometimes requires travelling significant distances to and from a client's residence for only a couple hours work a day.

One caregiver with an older woman client said the family contacted her once and said they were visiting for a week, so she wouldn't need to come in. "You can have a vacation," the son said cheerfully. Yeah right. She couldn't afford to pay rent that month. Again. She eventually moved into a van and quit caregiving. She was way too far behind on everything.

Anyhow, to hear about the criminal charges filed against those nurses who quit riles me. Working conditions for nursing home employees have never been good. Meanwhile, there are owners of such establishments living luxurious lives.

The other thing riling me---the fact that slaughterhouse exposee had to be done by the Humane Society, now underfire for not contacting the USDA sooner. The Humane Society shouldn't have had to do the exposee anyhow. That's the USDA's job. They contacted local authorities with the information, who were slow to act, but knew contacting the USDA or FDA would produce zero results. Now the USDA and FDA are ridiculing the Humane Society, a private organization, when they failed their taxpayer funded mandate because they're so lame at what they do?

Utterly Pathetic!!!!

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