posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
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(The following guest blog was originally published April 20, 2010 by the Alberta Teacher’s Association.)
An educator’s reflections on our healthcare system
Dennis Theobald
Recently, I had an opportunity to become more closely acquainted with Alberta’s healthcare system than I would have liked. But spending a week on my back in a hospital bed with various tubes running in and out of me provided a wonderful, if unwelcomed, opportunity to observe through the eyes of a teacher the work of the men and women employed by Alberta’s largest public service organization, Alberta Health Services.
Alberta Health Services is a behemoth. Employing over 85,000 people in some 400 facilities around the province, its annual budget is in excess of $10 billion. When I showed up in the emergency department of my local hospital, I was just one of 1.9 million patients who present themselves seeking emergency treatment in the course of a year. Though our education system is big, the healthcare system is bigger—much bigger, but the two systems have this much in common: both are fundamentally complex and both deal with people, who have a complexity all their own. Read on…
The Knowledge and Education Project (KEP) report was a collaborative effort between the LPNs, RPNs and RNs. It was an interesting qualitative research process comparing the education and knowledge held by all three categories of nurse prior to graduation. It did not deal with actual real-life nursing situations, so there are limitations to it use in policy and decision making.
The language in the report about LPNs being trained to deal with “stable patients” is very unfortunate, and is sometimes being misinterpreted and not presented as the researchers intended. (CARNA Letter to the Editor of the Edmonton Journal, published April 18, 2010.)
The following article, Understanding KEP: A non-researcher’s guide (reprinted from the Spring 2010 issue of CLPNA’s CARE magazine), explains a more rounded context about the KEP report and its place in nursing evaluation. Read on…
(updated April 20, 2010)
Linda Stanger, Executive Director of the CLPNA recently wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Edmonton Journal. She rebutted some misinformation published in an earlier letter and clarified the roles and responsibilities of LPNs in delivering high quality professional nursing care. Other letters on the same issue were also published in the newspaper on April 4, 9 and 18, 2010. “Read on…” for the links. Read on…
The Alberta health care system has been in a state of turmoil and change for some time now, with regional boards superseded by the new Super Board, threats of bed closures, various labour issues, a Cabinet shuffle, the Budget, and a new Minister who is reversing many prior policy positions, all adding to the turbulence.
The CLPNA has been looking at this situation and learning from it. We have also been wondering what this confusion is doing to the public’s perceptions of what they want from professional nursing in Alberta. So we commissioned Cambridge Strategies Inc. to do a survey of Albertans and CLPNA members to get some answers. The conjoint survey was designed to get information, insight and clarity on what values Albertans, and LPNs, see as most important for driving and guiding the delivery of professional nursing care in the province.
What we found was very interesting and especially helpful for LPNs and our work in the health care system. Read on…
