ENGLISH 8

Submitted by: Daniel Anthony L. Cabrera

Section: 3-BLM

How to do Essay
 Activity # 3: How to do Essay

Source: Reader’s Digest, September 1, 2007

“How Hospitals Gamble the Lives of Citizens”

In a special feature of Reader’s Digest on September 2001, hospitals in California are being accused

of gambling the lives of said patients. It has been said that hospitals were using unlicensed aides to

perform surgical operations that were supposedly the obligation of the doctors themselves. This

unlicensed aides were said to be surgical assistants who have no college degree and were making money

just like registered nurses do. Gruesome stories and testimonies have given the benefit of the doubt to

the citizens. There were even allegations that states that there are people who have been shuffled out of

the ICUs job titles and made the task of identifying aides to be cumbersome. These accusations that have

been mentioned were being investigated on June morning. In addition, this allegations are divided into

three. These are the unlicensed assistant who in testimony said that “I often felt like I had a patient’s life

in my hands, and I was wondering what do I do here?” these assistant, by nature, only have the duty to

secure minimal tasks such as taking the patient’s temperature, bathing them or helping them move from

bed to chair. However there has been no allegation made that pressures to reduce cost that would

gradually change the aides’ job. Though assistants have been cut during 1996, their numbers still flourish

throughout 1999 according to calculations. Another of three allegations was that most unlicensed aides

have no more than a high school degree and one in five of them lack it. It causes sickness of the patients

worse than their normal capacity to achieve so.

“I often felt like I had a patient’s life in my hands and I was wondering what do I do here” was one of

the testimonies that the unlicensed aides who were being tasked to do surgical performance. It is illegal

for hospitals to use people who are not qualified because they are no trained to do things that the doctors

usually do. Citizens pay a lot of money to have to have treatment from doctors who are best qualified for
the job. They estimately pay until 1 Million dollars and doctors hire unqualified people to do or perform

their job. This is unfair to the citizens of America. Originally unlicensed aides were limited to tasks that

required small amount of training however due to the reduction of cost and desire of hospitals to increase

their income drastically, they decided to make use of illegal aides. In the policy of this hospitals, you don’t

have to become a brain surgeon to perform minimal tasks. The unlicensed assistant personnel typically

makes 10 dollars an hour compared with 21 dollars that registered nurses make. This is an example on

how hospitals in America gamble for their patients’ lives. On early January, a woman called her doctor at

Hayward California complaining of symptoms that were classic for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. This is

an extremely dangerous swelling of the artery that carries blood from the heart. Unknown to her, the

medical advice phone was intentionally not answered by the unlicensed aides. The woman called four

times in a day yet it was even that aides who had the audacity to decide on whether or not she really

needed medical attention. Not until the afternoon that the woman was finally allowed to see the doctor and

by then it was too late. The aneurysm ruptured while she was being prepared for emergency surgery

causing to suffer an excruciating death because of the stupidity of the aides.

On another allegation, most unlicensed aides have no more than a high school degree and one in

five percentages even lacks it. These unlicensed aides did not even have a proper education for them to

be abler to do tasks of the doctors. After an example, these doctors who hire unlicensed aides find

themselves in a burden of paper work for them to be able to admit this unlicensed aides in a legal way. A

testimony of one of the doctors states that the patients who are still in ventilators or cardiac monitors are

being moved out of the ICUs to the floors where there is only one nurse for every five to six patients, rather

than the standard of having one nurse for every two patients. Another testimony was a 61 years old Shirley

Keck who was hospitalized due to pneumonia on Feb 1998 at Wesley Medical Center. The condition of

Shirley even worsened. Her daughter even had to beg for three and a half hours for help but it appeared

that her mother’s nurse was already in a hurry. The nurse has been alleged to have been working six days

a week. As a result of the performance of the hospital, Shirley experienced cardiac arrest. It was because

of the fact that Keck’s condition was missed by the service of the nurse and other hospital staff who entered
the room. The hospital was denied of all liability maintaining that the staffing of the nurses met all the

appropriate standards and that the staff was not even negligent in maintaining and monitoring Keck. The

hospital further claimed that the fault lay with the doctors who misdiagnosed Keck and did not even proper

do proper treatment.

According to some health care experts, they think that the problems posed by unlicensed aides are

greatly overwhelmed. They tried to reduce cost without affecting the quality thereof. This is the very reason

why nurses are raising concerns about these illegal aides. The nursing profession states that this is a very

serious issue. They believe that hospitals should be staffed with a greater ratio of nurses and that they

should be paid higher. Another testimony states that over his 20 year experience at the Arizona Hospital,

nearly numerous patients even die because of the incompetence of unlicensed aides. One time he

checked a seriously ill patient whose oxygen mask had been taken away by an aide during lunch time and

left for an hour. The color of the patient’s face became blue and if the doctor had not came in, the patient

would have surely died. Another testimony states that heart problems and drug side effect were not

recognized at a timely way because the first line of caregivers were poorly trained. These are some

multiple cases across the US. Most unlicensed aides have been said to be doing their very best but this

could not suffice it since they were not even trained to be surgically adept. Another testimony suggests

that on March 1999, her husband had four vessel heart bypass surgery and when he had only been out

of surgery for 36 hours, his heart monitor was being read by people who a month earlier had been in the

dietary and housekeeping departments of the hospital. As they say, it is common for hospitals to take

workers from different departments such as housekeeping and cross train them to provide direct patient

care. In a 1996 report by the institute of roomful of newborn the illegal aide start worrying on what to do if

the baby suddenly starts choking or not breathing, they are not qualified to even handle it. According to

the medical experts in the institute of medicine. “No accepted mechanism exist either to measure the

competency or to certify the nursing personnel.

There is a thread to the American Society that hospital executives might continue to recruit even

more unlicensed aides. It is left to each state for them to regulate training unlicensed aides however most
don’t even bother to do it. A testimony suggests that she was given a two week training course on how to

take blood pressure and other vital signs. During the first year on the job in 1996, there were two registered

nurses four licensed practical nurses and two licensed aides carrying for 30 patients and it was only in

1997 that the staff cut off drastically. She was even asked to take IVs and remove catheters were she was

very nervous on the possible harm that she may inflict unto the patients. While it is normal to be nervous,

it is still immoral and against the law for them to be using unprofessional and untrained aides to work

medically, there is not a person who knows the full consequences of the experiment going on. The way

they treat their patients is below average and must be subject to legal actions as soon as possible.