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

Something To Make You Think

Leave it to the world's fourth-richest man to make us all do a double take. In a CNBC interview, Jeff Bezos argued that low earners should pay zero federal income tax, and he kept circling back to one example: a nurse in Queens making $75,000 a year. He asked why that nurse pays more than $1,000 a month in taxes, money he said could go toward rent or groceries instead. Critics were quick to flag the irony, pointing to reports that Bezos himself paid little or no federal income tax in some years. Agree with him or not, it is worth asking why a working nurse's paycheck became the talking point.

Something that adds insult to injury

Nothing says "Happy Nurses Week" like a layoff notice. NewYork-Presbyterian, one of the wealthiest and most financially stable hospital systems in the country, announced sweeping staffing cuts affecting more than 1,000 workers in a video town hall on the eve of Nurses Week, and reportedly just days after a $750 million settlement payout. Roughly 200 frontline staff, including 65 union nurses and nurse practitioners, were handed notices across four campuses, with cuts hitting pediatric NPs, a palliative care unit, and a pediatric infusion center. The nurses' union called the move "outrageous and deeply offensive," and it is hard to argue. When the money is clearly there but the nurses are not, you have to ask who the system is really built for.

Something that proves nurses never clock out

Here is why we do this. When retired Army Major General Lynn Collyar collapsed in cardiac arrest about a mile into a half-marathon, he had no pulse for roughly eight and a half minutes, and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest carries only about a 10% survival rate. Several runners with medical training, including Huntsville Hospital ICU nurse Sidney Long and school nurse Heather Alford, stopped their own races to start chest compressions and kept them going until EMS arrived. Today Collyar shows no visible signs of damage, and he recently reunited with the nurses who refused to run past him. As Long put it, days like that remind you why you get up every morning and do the job.

Something from a Subscriber

"Three years ago I was the new grad everyone forgot to orient. I cried in the supply closet more times than I will ever admit, and I was sure I was not cut out for the floor. Last week a brand-new nurse trailed me all shift like a duckling, apologizing for every single question. At 3 a.m. she froze during her first rapid response, and I saw myself in her, so I stood beside her, talked her through it, and let her run the whole thing. She stabilized her patient and thanked me afterward like I had done something heroic. I had not. I just remembered what it felt like to have no one. Be the nurse you needed when you started. That is the entire job some nights." — Danielle R., Med-Surg RN, Ohio

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