My visit to the ER yesterday

[magical thyme]

115. they aren't helping the labs any either

High burnout here, and cutting salaries to where it's no longer worth it to go to school for it. Doesn't pay enough and there aren't enough jobs to pay off student loans or justify the investment. If it weren't for the President's income based student loan repayment program, I would have been forced to sell my home at bankruptcy price (half its market value) and I wouldn't have enough left to start over.

We recently got a replacement blood gas analyzer. The old analyzer had some timing involved, but it was enough time that we weren't stressing horribly.

The new one allows us exactly 12 seconds to complete a sequence of steps or it kicks us right back to square one. Then we get to start over with a rapidly degrading specimen. It is clearly designed to force us to sprint through the process, without consideration that we are already seriously stressed or consideration of the fact that it opens the door to mistakes. How easy to miss correcting the patient temp if we're clicking through steps as fast as possible. But if we take the time to ask the resp tech if the patient's temp was 37, we may miss the 12 second deadline. This just kicks the stress level up. Everybody hates this instrument.

It wasn't a working tech who chose this instrument. It was a lab manager who snottily makes it clear not to ask her any questions because she doesn't know anything about actually working on the bench.

That said, MBAs may not be directly killing patients and their caretakers, but it is not ok running workers and communities into the ground and generally destroying our overall economy. Which is what they have been part and parcel of.