Nurse here! This keeps popping into my mind, keeps leaving me drawing a blank. Healthcare is a massive and resource-devouring industry, but is stuffed with people who actually give a shit about the people around them: the industry is a good candidate for improvement, and the people in it are likely to actually embrace those improvements (well, barring the odd salty af mofo who loses their shit at the first signs of change, but that person’s in every industry - they’ll figure it out eventually.)
I work in a run-of-the-mill hospital in the US, which encourages staff to take on system improvement projects, and these are were I see potential - especially for new nurses gunning for promotions.
The problem is what and how. All I can think of are things like recycling programs to tackle medical waste, but (at my facility at least) the waste that isn’t already being recycled is either biohazardous or risks becoming biohazardous (like medication waste is huge, but we can’t save half a vial of unused injection due to the possibility of that being contaminated by the first needle that drew from it).
So, looking for project ideas, both that I can start to implement myself, or to suggest to other staff looking to polish their resume. Smaller scale stuff is great for newer nurses; big scale stuff I can throw at management and see what sticks.
Let me know if you think of anything! Thanks all!
hey, sounds like you’re coming from a mad pride perspective based on the “toxic chemicals” rhetoric.
as a mad person myself, I don’t believe using unscientific language like that helps us achieve liberation. whether something is toxic depends on dosage, circumstance and context. for example, regardless if estrogen saved my life, administering it to a trans man in the same dosage I use would probably kill him. can you see how me calling a certain medicine toxic because it killed someone even would be taking things out of context?
chemicals are value-neutral, and making this association between something being chemical and something being harmful and “artificial” can easily lead to ableist policy like MAHA.
thank you for reading thus far and hopefully this is not taken as an attack on you ❤️
I appreciate your clarification, I have no idea what “mad pride” or “mad person” means if that is some kind of acronym or has some meaning other than “angry”, I have no particular organized agenda besides being “mad” in the sense of “angry at the state of the world” and while I might have been a bit loose and uninformed with terminology but I specifically had in mind chemotherapy where toxic chemicals are used to kill the rapidly-growing cancer cells faster than they kill the not-so-fast growing healthy cells.
Hopefully that clears things up although it probably just makes it more confusing. I have no idea. I’m just shouting aimlessly into the void most days. Sorry.
Even if we had pristine environments and only healthy food, cancer will still occur quite frequently. I of course support researching more effective cancer treatments than we currently have (and what we do have should be free to anyone who needs it), but until better options are available, chemotherapy, as awful as it can be, can be very effective depending on the specific cancer, and has spared many a horrible death despite it being a poison itself.
We would condemn tens of thousands to a slow death if we were to cast aside toxic chemotherapy without an adequate replacement that has proven itself.