What are the practical ramifications of nurses being replaced by less-expensive patient-care technicians?
I think it’s a very serious problem to give “techs” nursing-care duties. If they’re going to be doing nursing, they should be paid and educated like nurses. We consistently refuse to pay for care-giving in this country, and this is the latest iteration of that problem. The techs are very well-intentioned: they perform enormously important work in health care, but they are not qualified or educated to interpret patients’ illnesses. A lot of people think that nursing is just taking a patient’s vital signs and then reporting them to a doctor. But what nurses do with that information is to put it in the context of the patient and interpret its significance. Over and over again I have seen nurses rescuing their patients because they knew that something was wrong, even though the objective measures didn’t register any change. This often creates conflict with doctors, who are trained to ask “What are the objective measures?” Nurses will say, “Their temperature isn’t up, their blood pressure i
