Reflection Hours #4: Furthering Your Education

Today's reflection hours started a little later than usual. We'd just finish taking our OB ATI exam, and the students were trickling in one-by-one until an hour after our exam. We had the pleasure of speaking to Prof. "A" about our service hours and the need to further our education. Many of the students in class voiced their concerns about completing a bachelors: Should we wait until MDC have the BSN available or should we complete the RN-BSN program at FIU? What field of nursing are we interested in? Have we thought about the academic skills we need for the BSN (which has more "theory" classes than the ADN)?

It seems overwhelming for us to think about the BSN, since we're still trying to complete the ADN and being bogged down with reading assignments and examinations. However, for those of us who believe the salary difference between ADN and BSN are minimal, we can use the BSN as a "stepping stone" to an MSN. Some of us may want to remain a bedside staff nurse, and that's a very respectable position. Without staff nurses, hospitals cannot effectively provide patients holistic care. Maybe one day, after working on the floor for so many odd years, we would want a change, something less physically demanding yet still be involved in nursing. Maybe nursing management, insurance consulting, home health, and more. The great part of nursing, is that the opportunities are endless.

Today's vocabulary word: managed care (completely off-topic, I know). Managed care is an insurance-based approach that includes a collection of strategies such as prepayment arrangements and preadmission authorizations to control costs. With managed care, patients are being treated minimally and discharged early in order to reduce the costs to insurance agencies for medical treatments. This is a major ethical dilemma -- on the one hand, the costs of medical treatments have become very expensive and it's hard to manage effective treatment and keeping the costs to the hospital down. On the other hand, these patients are human beings and are being reduced to liability costs when they should be treated -- regardless of how they became sick (by not practicing disease prevention).