The endangered species

“Proper planning prevents poor outcomes”
-Author Unknown


Here in Alberta the new Super health board announced a plan to increase the number of LPN’s vs RN’s in the system by significant amounts over the next 2 years. The thinking appears to be that once again nurses are too expensive so they should be replaced with a lower cost alternative.

The powers that be in nursing are of course up in arms about this and have been urging members of the profession to register their concerns with said super board to prevent this from happening. Now personally I’ve seen this issue before in fact several times during my career and it’s always failed miserably but even I have to admit that this time it may just actually work out for them.

Why would replacing RN’s with LPN’s work now when it hasn’t before? Well there are of course a number of contributing factors to this but chief among them this time is the nursing profession itself.

9 years ago in what I have on several occasion described as one of the most myopic decisions in the history of the world the nursing profession officially did away with the diploma programs that for so long produced the bulk of the practicing nurses in the system. Allegedly this was done to make the nursing profession more professional under the belief that mandatory degree standards would produce better nurses. I’ll reserve comment on if that actually happened or not, but the one thing I do know is that the mandatory degree policy completely changed who could become a nurse and not necessarily for the better.

Ultimately this new standard has to my mind only produced fewer clinical nurses so in the end while we as a profession may complain that the LPN’s can’t do the job of an RN; the sober reality is that as a profession we can’t produce the number of nurses the system needs to ensure the very standard the powers that be now demand we little old diploma nurses to defend.

We my friends are the engineers of our own demise!

Nursing as we know it has become an endangered species because if we can’t provide the service our own profession states should be the minimum standard someone else will.

Enter the LPN’s.

Hopefully they’ll be smarter then we as a profession have been and plan for the future and not be as arrogant as to put themselves out of business.