Schools For The Medical Sector
Nurse Gloria Diaz, who worked in the bone marrow oncology unit, is "waiting for the bank to write me a foreclosure note." Her husband lost his aerospace job in March. The couple will have to pull their 11-year-old son out of private school to make ends meet. The couple also have two girls, ages 7 and 6.
"I thought this would be a lifetime place of work for me," said Diaz, 40, a 19-year nursing veteran who applied unsuccessfully for work at seven medical assistant schools.
The nursing shortage gave her a false sense of security -- and now the move toward less trained health-care workers leaves her embittered.
"I can do the work that an aide or an LVN at a medical assistant schools, but an LVN or aide can't do what I do," she said. "It's become a business. It's just a trend of the time. Everything now comes down to how much it costs and how much will (hospitals) gain from it." Nurse Ruby Allen, 32, is refinancing her family's La Crescenta home while she looks for work and cares for her 1-year-old daughter. She's relying on her husband's income as a manager of a door manufacturing company. Allen feared that the hospital was trying to force registered nurses into supervisory roles. "I didn't become a nurse to become a supervisor of LVNs and aides," she said. "The bedside nursing thing is being taken away from the RNs." City of Hope nurses had walked out partially because of a management proposal to change job descriptions in their contract. They believed that the hospital was opening the door to cut back on registered nurses by hiring unlicensed workers, some of whom would have no high school diploma and only a few weeks' training, said nurse Kathy Patane of the California Nurses Assn., which represented striking workers. Meanwhile, the replaced RNs are finding that the only nursing jobs they can find are ones they'd rather not take, such as the overnight shift in a nursing home, she said. "The RN at the bedside is going to be a novelty," Patane said. "You're going to find overqualified people looking for jobs that at one time they would never thought of applying for." Hospital officials deny that they intend to push out RNs, saying they want only the right to update job descriptions annually, based on changing needs. But nurses point to a handout from a hospital training seminar last fall on a proposed "Partners-in-Practice" plan to team registered nurses with licensed vocational nurses, nursing students and unlicensed assistants. The team-nursing system "provides critical relief to the issue of RN scarcity," the handout said.
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