Question: Comment 1
As a passionate psychiatry nurse, I picked my executive summary to be a suicide prevention program. Deaths by suicide have risen across the United States as reported by the Center for Disease Control in 2017. Suicide deaths are considered a crisis in the Mental Health profession. Suicide is not biased. It affects Caucasians, Africa-Americans, Indian, etc. It also affects the young, middle age, and elderly. According to the CDC, over 45,000 reported suicides occurred in 2016 in the United States. Suicide was ranked the tenth leading cause of death.
There needs to be more programs for suicide prevention that is readily available and ready to help. The State of Alabama has a suicide hotline and several programs but they are in the big cities and that is not feasible for people who live an hour or two away. There needs to be more help all people who suffer mental illnesses.
Comment 2
I would like to describe differing approaches of nursing leaders and managers to issues in practice when discussing nurse-staffing ratios. This is a big issue in the country because aside from California, legally mandated nurse-staffing ratios do not exist. When it is discussed in the hospital now, nursing supervisors discourage it by telling nurses that it is not all it's cracked up to be. Some hospitals can go under due to the need to staff appropriately. When talking to a nurse who has worked under both situations, she has said that the cost of healthcare ends up declining in a good way because nurses are making less overworked mistakes and patient-satisfaction is up. This can be the big difference between managers and leaders in the big picture of things. Managers will listen to nursing complaints of being overworked beyond safe circumstances and the manager will simply say, "this is what you signed up for when you became a nurse," like we're soldiers complaining about being shot at when we chose to be a soldier. We signed up for nursing to care for patients and participate in the optimization of their help. Leaders will listen to nursing complaints and ask themselves what can they do to help. At the end of the day, if more people were leaders, nursing shortages may not exist. Nurses would be happier and stay in their positions longer.