Reply #30: Thankfully, the majority of the MD's I work with are great

[Heddi]

Our hospital is not-for-profit, and about 80% of our annual revenue goes to charity cases, etc. We service a large hispanic and native american population, as well as many poverty level non-hispanics and non-native americans. Our community is plagued with diabetes, heart disease, alcoholism, sadly, and even sadder is that most of the people we service have no insurance or are so pittifully underinsured as to basically have no insurance.

The MD's I work with do a large amount of pro-bono and reduced rate work. They also understand that us Nurses can't afford medical services because our salaries are so low so they tend to give us the "poor person discount" as well :-)

It irks me when the CEO of my hospital has no medical experience (he ran a bank before running the hospital) and makes more money in a month than I make all year. He is obscenely wealthy and at our yearly Company-Wide meetings is quite flip about our stagnant salaries, and how we should be proud to do what we do (we are), and that somehow personal satisfaction for taking care of people will somehow supplement our shitty incomes and benefits. Yeah, personal happiness is always welcomed by my landlord in lieu of rental payments.....

Our unit--the telemetry unit--deals with very unstable patients---we don't have enough blood pressure cuffs for the patients, so we RN's and the nurse tech's have spent our own money buying personal blood pressure cuffs ($45 each) so that we can take blood pressures. Oh, we just don't have the budgetary money for more BP cuffs (or thermometers, or blankets...) but that fucker CEO certainly doesn't have a problem getting his annual pay raise via the Board of Trustees....none of whom have ever worked on the floor as a health care provider. Oh, it's not in the budget.....yet we can find money in the budget every year for a 2,000 person birthdya party for the CEO....and a 2,000 person anniversary party for the CEO.....