Hello fellow Nurse, this is your weekly handoff. Some quick and dirty nursing news that’s worth sharing. Enjoy!

Make sure you don’t miss our first ever subscriber story at the end!!

Something for the travelers

I am truly intrigued to see what will happen to travel nurse rates in the near future. With my very limited understanding of the stock market, I would say the crash we have seen in travel nurse contract pay is similar to the 2008 stock market crash. Again. Very limited understanding of the stock market. The fact is though, contracts that were once paying 3-4 thousand a week are now only paying 2 thousand.. and that’s if you’re lucky. I would be very interested to hear from travel nurses who were traveling before the pandemic to see if these rates we are seeing now are more back to “normal” or if they are even lower than before the pandemic. It’s understandable the rates are lower with covid being controlled, however, I wonder if some of these lower rates aren’t because these hospitals are out of money. After paying those ridiculously high paying contracts through covid, a lot of them are in the red. Banning local contract nurses could be a strategy to entice those travelers to join as staff, but I think many will just go elsewhere. As this article states, there just aren’t enough incoming staff nurses to replace those local travelers that are now banned. The risk for short staffing is yet again high.

Something to warm your hearts

This new nursing role is titled the “Kate Nurse'“ and when you read why you’ll maybe get a little teary eyed. Emma Simpson is the first ever Kate Nurse. Her roll? To help patients with stage four breast cancer. Kate Butler, who passed from breast cancer, is whom this roll is named after. The Worcestershire Breast Unit Haven charity will cover the cost of the position for the next two years. I with there was more information to be found on specifics of what kind of support this nurse role will have such that other hospitals could consider funding it as well. Regardless, just the title says a lot about how impactful this role will be.

Something to be concerned about

Viral sepsis in babies in Europe has US physicians nervous for when this could hit the states. While enterovirus and other viruses frequently run rampant in the summer, there is fear that there may be a deadlier strain. “In May, the WHO called attention to a cluster of a particular type of enterovirus, called echovirus-11. Nine babies in France within their first month of life had been infected and developed organ failure and sepsis. Seven died.” This Echovirus-11 also popped up in Italy, making at least 10 severely sick and killing 1. While infection with enterovirus is common, infant death at this high of a rate is not. There is concern that with the pandemic “throwing all viral activity off”, there could be even more enterovirus this summer. Personally, my biggest concern is that the CDC states that they have no way to track if this specific seemingly deadly Echovirus-11 is in the US yet. There is not currently a way to track this specific strain to that level and especially in infants. This makes me more than a little nervous- keep on the lookout peds nurses!

Something from a Subscriber

Zombies

In nursing school I worked as a CNA in a hospital and on this shift I was assigned to sit with a patient on the neuro floor. Never a good start. He was male, probably mid 30s. He’d been in a four wheeling accident and had a major TBI. Super confused- hence the sitter. It was a night shift, so naturally he was wide awake and rowdy. Now, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe it was his head injury that made him this way, but the guy was a total perve. He kept asking me, a young woman at the time, if I was there to go to bed with him. After many attempts at redirecting and reminding him that he was in the hospital, I was running out of ideas. He was very certain his work truck was outside and he needed to get going anyways. I turned on some music and asked him what he liked. He said- Zombies by the Cranberries. So, for the next three hours we would play only that song on repeat as he played air guitar and sang it horribly. Three hours. Finally that got boring for him. So, with permission, we went on a walk to see if that would get some energy out. (He had very minor physical injuries from his accident) Well. The man ends up shitting all down the hallway. He is cackling with laughter as it falls out from his hospital gown. He thinks it’s the funniest thing ever. I want to believe it was an accident, but I’m pretty sure it was on purpose. I get him back to his room (and call housekeeping) and say we need to shower him off. He refuses to shower himself and insists that I, the young woman, helps him. I say, let me call your nurse to help me. He makes a crude comment and is obviously looking forward to it. Well, with his memory loss, he forgot his nurse that night was a male. He was very disappointed, but he still refused to clean himself up. So, the nurse decides to stand at a distance with the detachable shower head and spray him off. I will never get the image out of my head of this man standing butt naked in star pose facing the shower wall as he is getting hosed down… All while singing Zombies by the Cranberries at the top of his lungs.

By: A nurse who didn’t pursue neuro as her specialty 

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