Located 100+km from the southern tip of Taiwan, it is not easy for us to hire staff. I spent around 2+ yrs to get a full time general surgeon. As for nursing staff, the situation is no where better. Most of the wards short of 1-2 staff averagely.
The key to the shortage of nursing staff is the pay. Our pay is considered as par around this part of the county.
A par means we could only get whatever other people reject. Indeed most of the new staff was either 1st timer to the job or basically under average. The time for them to have proper attitude and proper working skill was so long that it is intolerable, and so of them never evovled....
Imaging that there was one time we had 3 ICU nurses who was over 100kg. I am fat myself but for ICU nurse with that kind of size, it would be difficult for them to move about. Well, both 3 of them were transferred to ward after 3 months.
Recently the ED nurses were so short that Lem started to grumbled. He is rather a nice guy and to get to his nerve it would really take a good effort. 1/3 of our staffs were below average either in attitude or skill. I would directly point out their fault when I noticed it but Lem does not act like me. As the head of dept. he is consider a nice person.
Once, the deputy supt had had a discussion with me and we agree that the nursing staff would really need a raise and we should start to kick out whoever that is unfit. A raise would attract more applicant and we could choose. According to our observation, the plan is definitely gonna work as there were so many mistake/violation of SOP done in the past. Some of the mistake was so non-forgivable from my point of view. But what can we do, you pay what you get what.
However it would be a hard move as the nurse dept had been a welfare dept for quite a long time. The tolerance was so high that no one was fired/demoted due to mistake in the past.
Recently 2 head nurses was demoted – 1 due to some “black mail” attacking her being unfair , the other due to poor performance leading to failure during an evaluation. It is a good start, but still a long long way to go.
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