Health Care Professionals Group

Can medical doctors do their jobs without nurses?

If the amount of nurse that a hospital employs was cut by a third, and CNAs (for patient care) were increased by half, can medical doctors still do their jobs? How dependent are doctors on the nurses in the hospital? Nurses, how dependent do you think doctors are on you? ___ Note I know that doctors don't work for the hospital.

Public Comments

1. Dunno about other countries, but in Mexico doctors are forced to learn how to take blood samples and put in catheters and such. In the possible case there aren't enough nurses doctors will send the lowest ranking doctor in the hospital to do the nurses's work for them which usually is the internist or the first and maybe second year resident. Med students do some of these things under supervision. However, it's unethical for example that a sole doctor does something like a rectal exam alone even if there aren't any other nurses. If there's no nurses around, they have to have another doctor of any rank or heck, even a janitor as a last resort if there's nobody else and the exam can't be delayed.
2. Hospitals are basically run by nurses. They are generally very gracious and allow us to practice with them, but it's a foolish doctor who doesn't recognize his place in the scheme of things. I can't imagine a hospital in the US being so overstaffed with nurses that it could possibly make such a radical change in staffing as you hypothesize. That sounds an awful lot like some administrator is trying to get his hospital to be more "efficient," which sounds nice to shareholders but is ultimately not a sensible or functional goal. A considerable degree of inefficiency is a desirable thing in patient care simply because of the complexity of sick people. Some administrators, thinking in terms of industry instead of people, mistake their nursing payroll for an expense, when in fact it's their inventory.
3. We work as a team, and we do entirely different things, each contributing to the care of patients. We are interdependent. We don't have enough nurses as it is. Cutting their numbers further is bad medicine.
4. In theory, YES! In reality, NO!!!!