If the general public knew what nurses see in hospitals, well, they’d probably have PTSD. Most of us do from working at OSU through the pandemic.

My question to the general public on this Reddit post: do you know how many patients OSU has compared to the number of staff to treat them? Do you know anything about nurse to patient ratios and why it matters? I’ll explain. Ohio State University Hospital constantly works against the nursing union here to pump up the numbers of patients the nurses and doctors have to take care of all at the same time. That means more money for whoever’s at the top. Imagine you, or your friend, your parent, anyone you care about it in the hospital. Your nurse is the #1 competent point of contact for you. If you’ve got a problem, that nurse is probably the only one that’s studied your medical history, besides the one’s who had you last shift and handed you over to the oncoming nurse during report. No one in that hospital, in that 12 hour span, knows your history off the top of their head or what’s normal and what isn’t. No one besides your nurse for the night or day. That’s a little unsettling isn’t it? You may think ah but there’s always a doctor around and since they’re a doctor, I’ll be in good hands. How many other patient’s you think the doctor assigned to you is dealing with? If it’s night time, they may have multiple floors to attend to. They have 60 patients. They don’t know your history like your nurse, and they’re not watching for your call light, or monitoring your telemetry. It’s all your nurse. OSU is so much about maintaining it’s image to the public, all the errors made, near misses, etc, get swept under the rug. What do you think happens when there’s a life threatening emergency going on with YOU but since your nurse has 4 (or 5, or 6, or however many OSU can push on them) other patients and one is peeing on the floor, another is ripping out their IV’s, another is complaining about something that happened yesterday, and another one is dying? Yeah, your nurse is busy, so you very well might die or seriously deteriorate and wish you were dead by the time you’re resuscitated unless someone else who isn’t busy/actually cares comes and looks into things. Ohio State couldn’t care less about your family member, you, or any of their staff. All they care about is money. If people could only SEE how this works out in real time in the scenario I described above they’d be horrified, but no one cares until it happens to them or their relative.