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!
The problem there is that the skills and knowledge go hand-in-hand, and something being safe vs not is dependent on it being used correctly. If you’re encountering reluctance from medical folks to give you DIY resources, it’s most likely from the fear of giving you advice that’ll turn around and fuck you up. And we don’t want to fuck you up. But as you mentioned, the longer term consequences (suicide) potentially far exceed fucking up a shot… like degradation of your subcutaneous tissue because something that was supposed to be injected intramuscular was erroneously injected into the fat, causing it to break down and leaving you with a nasty pit (clinically minor, but disfiguring). Or failing to instruct you to sanitize the stopper and your injection site with alcohol pads, leading to necrotizing fasciitis, (which can kill you).
All that said, I agree with you - you’re more than capable of understanding those risks and taking the time to learn both the skills and the knowledge to mitigate them. Whether or not to take that risk is solely up to you. What I’d advise is to take a deep dive into literally every step of the process: The DIY guide you found said to use one needle to draw the solution and another one to inject… why? With an inch and a half needle… why? that’s a 27 gauge… why? Says inject it into your thigh… why? At a 90* angle… why? What do you do if something goes wrong? How can you even tell if something’s gone wrong? You get the gist. The skill of actually giving a shot is the easy part - understanding the ‘why’ gets crazy complicated.
Numbers and such pulled out of my ass - I don’t know squat about estrogen, so real instructions will almost certainly be different. But if you’re doing it DIY, you really do need to become your own nurse. (and if that stuff comes naturally to you, get your ass into nursing school!!).
Having never given estrogen before, I’m pretty sure you already know more about it than I do, but if any of your DIY instructions seem odd or even wrong, feel free to bounce it off me and I’d be happy to share what insight I have.
I’m sorry, but this is just naive. Many hospitals and doctors refuse to offer HRT based solely on self-identification even though WPATH acknowledges that it is just as safe as a psychological gatekeeping track.
And when HRT is provided, trans men are trusted to do testosterone injections bybthe same hospitals that require trans women to visit a GP for estrogen injections even though both are equally risk-prone. Anti-androgens can be more complicated, but that too can be taught in an hour.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of trans people across the world take pharmaceuticals from illegal and semi-legal suppliers with no bad batches that I’ve heard of. Like with addictive drugs, illegal suppliers tend to know their stuff.
Perhaps you’ve rationalized your fear at trans DIY as concern about people fucking up, but when and where that fear is applied is simply inconsistent, and systematically disempowers and provides worse service to trans people, women, people of color, and other minorities.
What people in medicine are afraid of is empowering minorities. Concern for our wellbeing if we were to be empowered is just the language to justify that feeling.
I’m not saying you’re deliberately setting out to be discriminatory, just that the medical culture has taught you to have a different gut reaction to a cis man regulating his own medication than to a trans nonbinary person doing the same.
Previous poster specified “medics” which I understood as the people on the actual units providing care; and their reluctance to teach skills without the foundation of knowledge that enables those skills. My take was to put myself in their shoes and consider why - the very obvious answer being that doing so can cause harm. The number of bigots working the front lines is of course higher than zero, but also a very clear minority, so jumping to that as the answer to why they behave a certain way around trans people is not correct.
You’re getting more into all the bullshit that influences healthcare at the systemic level: administration, politics, religion… and your right, the answers there get a lot more nefarious, but are very much not the people the previous poster or I was discussing.
This is called “rationalization”. People are very good at finding reasonable whys when they go looking for them, in a way that correlates very weakly to actual reality.
If you think it takes bigotry to personally partake in systemic discimination, that is dangerous, and you will hurt people because of it.
If you care about people around you, especially if they are women or minorities, please read up on intersectionality, soft discrimination, microaggression, etc. Or better yet talk about it with friends and comrades.
These are all theory to describe lived experiences that are common sense once you empathize with the person who is a minority rather than with the nurse denying them medical aid.
edit to add: And to be clear, I’m not saying you’re a bigot. The whole point is that you don’t need to be a bigot to act discriminatory. Empathy for minorities (and people in general) is a constant practice, especially because every minority (and person) is different so the way society has taught us to disciminate against them is different. We all constantly need to unlearn stuff, and the sooner you start the better.