Last Thursday, the president spoke on the American Jobs Act. I was very surprised he didn’t mention that geriatric care is THE way to stimulate the economy and create jobs.
I mean, for goodness’ sake, as of Jan. 1, 2011, there are 10,000 people a day turning 65. Talk about a tsunami (albeit a silver one) of opportunity!
But with this huge wave of aging in America we don’t have the workforce to handle it. Jobs are there: We just have to fill them.
This is my vision … do you see it, too?: A silver tidal wave logo on the podium as the president intones, “My fellow Americans, I am here tonight to tell you that we have come up with a solution to this economic downturn. This is a way to improve the economy and create jobs, and do incredible good works at the same time. I’ve had my top economic minds look at this and I am here to tell you tonight that getting into geriatric care can NOT BE BEAT.”
(Full audience standing ovation — hear the roar …).
This, my friends, is the answer to prosperity. You can’t argue the truth. Americans are aging at a pace faster than ever in our history. Between 2010 and 2030, the number of adults over 65 years of age is expected to double. Americans are living longer. Therefore, we will create an economy that works well into the future.
We live in an age where the technology should make medical information accessible for all healthcare professionals. It also makes this time ripe for electronic medical records with health information exchange available in all areas of the healthcare continuum.
Now, I realize that corporate America is so greedy that no one is creating systems that interact with each other. And to complicate that, no one understands just what HIPAA is, so they won’t share information anyway.
E-prescribing should be easy, but the majority of nursing homes and their provider pharmacies don’t have the funding to create systems to make this work. And while I appreciate the Drug Enforcement Agency saying that its answer to the “nurse Agent” problem is to allow e-prescribing of schedule II narcotics, the parameters they want on those systems don’t exist yet — and are years in the future from being created.
But today I have created the “Stop Blocking Health Informatics Technology Act,” which will provide huge incentives to those that create, at low cost, health information exchange systems that work across all healthcare systems, including practitioner offices and nursing homes.
Let’s put our teachers back to work! Nursing students are lining up at the door now. We turn away, on average, 35,000 qualified nursing applicants each year. And instead of growing our own, we spend millions bringing in, sponsoring and then giving entitlements to foreign nurses yearly, people with different nursing educational curriculum and components than American nurses.
Other countries actually pay students while in nursing school and fully fund their education, but we have some of the highest tuitions in the world. On top that, we want to pay Ph.D. prepared nursing educators only slightly more than administrator assistant salaries. Hence, no teachers to teach the students lining up.
Only a small handful of medical schools have geriatric rotations, even though we are an aging society. And what new physician — with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off — wants to go into geriatrics when the average Medicare reimbursement for a comprehensive, Level One visit is $56?
We continue to cut Medicare and Medicaid payments — yet ask more of facilities, doctors, staff and state surveyors. And then penalize everyone for not doing a great job with less than can get the job done.
Nursing assistants are forced to work 1½ or two full-time jobs just to keep bread on the table.
But I am here to say that now is the time for change! We will support schools and put teachers back to work, we will find a way to stop wasting money in our education system, and give incentives to those going into geriatric care. We will put America’s workforce to work in the right place and stop outsourcing by “bringing in.”
We will create good health information exchange systems to improve transitions of care and communication. We will pay fairly for those who care for America’s most vulnerable population. We will reform Medicare, not cut payments. We will spend smarter.
If we provide the right incentives and the right rewards, this is how America will be NUMBER ONE AGAIN. So join me, and let’s do things right.
OK, maybe for the first time I’m keeping it unreal.
But I can dream.
Nurse Jackie
The Real Nurse Jackie is written by Jacqueline Vance, RNC, CDONA/LTC — a real life long-term care nurse who is also the director of clinical affairs for the American Medical Directors Association. A nationally respected nurse educator and past national LTC Nurse Administrator of the Year, she also is an accomplished stand-up comedienne. She has not starred in her own national television series — yet.
