Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 207

Thursday, June 15, 2000 THE HARTFORD COURANT A21 Other Opinion Will Medication Technicians Do Better Than Nurses? became an admirer of nurses, ER nurses, several i years ago when a writing assignment required that I hang out in a local emergency room for a few months. Watching nurses who could sense the sudden drop in blood pressure of a patient behind the Vivian B. Martin the country. Zwingman-Bagley predicts a "very, very bad crisis" in Connecticut in the next two to five years as many operating room nurses and other specialists, many of whom are approaching 50, retire. A national study by the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services found that only 9 percent of nurses are less than 30 years old. In Connecticut, nursing groups are planning to lobby for more financial support for nursing education, but Zwingman-Bagley says part of the task will be to attract younger men and women, many of whom have been seduced by more lucrative careers. Yet one of the other major trends that will make the recruiting of new nurses difficult is the seemingly contradictory trend of nursing layoffs. Reports by the PEW Health Professions Commission have forecast the loss of up to 300,000 nursing jobs in hospitals in the early years of the 21st century as those organizations restructure or close. What is really happening is that the role of nursing is changing, as it has been doing since Florence Nightingale's days.

As interesting as this is sociologically, it doesn't provide comfort to the frail woman or man in a room down the hall who may go for days without a visit from a nurse. Vivian B. Martin teaches journalism at Central Connecticut State University. Her column appears every other Thursday. To leave her a comment, please call (on a touch-tone phone) Courant Source at 3644.

to counter a nursing shortage. Such information doesn't make the plan any smarter; it just makes us more aware of the growing mound of evidence supporting those who have been saying that critical health care workers, particularly nurses, are being stripped of their responsibilities, and in some cases replaced, by lower-skilled and lower-paid workers, to the detriment of healthcare. Certainly, there is much dispute about such claims. Cheryl Zwingman-Bagley, president of the Connecticut Nurses Association, cites studies that say patients have better outcomes when nurses rather than unlicensed staff are at their bedside. Zwingman-Bagley says medicine rounds are the only time some nurses get to see patients during their shift, "and now they want to take that away." Ton! Fatone, executive vice president of the Connecticut Association of Health Care Facilities, which represents nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, says nurses groups and others have portrayed the medication tech bill unfairly.

"You'd think the maintenance man was going to be giving out meds" by their talk, she says. Yet most patients probably would prefer to get medicine from a nurse, who brings a combination of trained intuition, experience and medical education, than someone without much more than a high school degree and whatever medication training is provided. Medication technicians may be the future, given nursing shortages and other crises be- curtains across the room, or who stayed after their shift to console people whose children or other family members died in the ER, was humbling. The nurses I saw, who were there for patients and their families when doctors could not be or didn't want to be, became my model of what I would want for myself or any family member in a hospital or nursing home. But a bill that was tucked into another piece of legislation and approved during last-minute business at the General Assembly recently is probably more of a sign of the future than my nursing heroines and heroes are.

The bill allows the Department of Public Health to set up regulations allowing aides to distribute pills and other medicine. That's a job currently done by nurses for whom the medication rounds are a chance to give some bedside care and look over the patient Proponents of the new law say that specially trained medication technicians could free nurses up for other work and that such measures have been adopted in many states ELEANOR MILL more active role in developing strategies to help alleviate the nursing shortage that has nursing homes and other health care agencies offering signing bonuses. Fatone says some of the members of her association have been trying to recruit nurses from as far away as the Philippines and Ireland. Nursing shortages are a problem across setting the health care industry. But state health officials, who will have the final say, should only allow the practice as a last resort.

Nursing homes that choose to use medication technicians, if such workers are approved, should be required to alert prospective patients and their families. Additionally, health officials should take a Slowdown May Please Greenspan, But Not African Americans been in a long time. The fact that the unemployment rate for African Americans has dropped below the double-digit level represents a significant improvement in the status of African American workers. At the same time, it is unacceptable that an 8 percent unemployment rate among African Americans is considered progress. Would we be so complacent if whites had as high a rate of joblessness? Further, the unemployment rate does not measure the left out those who don't even show up in the data because they have dropped from the labor force.

It doesn't deal with the high unemployment rates that teens, especially teens of color, experience. And it doesn't measure the increased number of unemployment claims that were filed in the last couple of weeks, claims that suggest private-sector employment has dropped by about a million workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The economic expansion has been uneven, and policy- too many others. Unemployment rate increases signal the slowdown that Greenspan and some stock and bondholders have been seeking. Stock market speculators were happy, betting that Greenspan would be less likely to raise interest rates, which would hurt stocks.

Bondholders were glad, since more unemployment means less inflationary pressure, and inflation would decrease the effective return on bonds. And some business executives may see rising unemployment as a way to gain leverage over their workers. But millions of workers already have little leverage to bargain for higher wages. In fact, last month the average hourly wage went up only a penny. If the party is over, what do we tell those who were never invited? Julianne Mai veaux is a Washington-based economist and a nationally syndicated columnist.

She wrote this for the Progressive Media Project, an op-ed service in Madison, Wis. makers have ignored that fact. When we saw progress month after month, there was a window of opportunity to target programs to those who lived at the periphery of the expansion. Now that the economy is weakening, the least and the left out have even less of a chance of improving their lot. The rising unemployment rate is not the only evidence of economic slowdown.

Sales at U.S. retail stores dropped for a second straight month in May. Total retail sales fell 0.3 percentlastmonthfollowinga0.6percentfall in April. There are other indications that expansion simply ain't what it used to be. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that cardboard box shipments are slowing, and used that as a sign that the economy is cooling.

The newspaper has a point. The dot-com economy that so many of us are enamored of requires boxes to package the goods that are ordered. If retailers are ordering fewer boxes, we're ordering fewer products. It is ironic that the stock market rose on news that the unemployment rate had increased. While a rising unemployment rate signals misery for some, it is good news for JULIANNE MALVEAUX Wien the Federal Reserve Board meets at the end of this month, it will decide whether to increase interest rates yet again to "slow down" what some think is an overheated economy.

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan speaks frequently of putting the brakes on an economy that is moving too fast But why should he put on the brakes when some don't even have the gas to start up their cars? The most recent unemployment rate figures show a cooling of our supposedly overheated economy. The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9 percent to 41 percent. For African Americans, the rise was much steeper from 7.2 percent to 8 percent To be sure, these rates are much lower than they have Advertisement Government Continues To Creep Into America's Classrooms he contest between Al I Gore and George Bush for the office of national school superintendent OJ FIGHT INCREASING CABLE RATES means Washington will expand its role in education. Until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal government had essentially nothing certainly nothing essential to do with elementary and secondary education. Today, the federal government supplies only 7 percent of the money George F.

Will In 1975, in a case concerning students suspended for fighting, the court expanded students' due process rights, holding that students have a property right to their education. So lawyers and judges were pulled even deeper into school discipline procedures, presiding over at a minimum elaborate hearings with witnesses. Designed to make schools more "fair" and "responsive," such decisions, writes Hymowitz, made school administrators act defensively and look legalistic and obtuse: "When a New York City high school student came to school with a metal-spiked ball whose sole purpose could only be to maim classmates, he wasn't suspended: Metal-spiked balls weren't on the superintendent's detailed list of proscribed weapons. Suspend him and he might sue you for being arbitrary and capricious. "Worse, the influence of lawyers over school discipline means that educators speak to children in an unrecognizable language, far removed from the straight talk about right and wrong that most children crave Students correctly sense that what lies behind such desiccated language is not a moral worldview and a concern for their well-being and char-" acter but fear of lawsuits." DIRECTV AVERAGE CABLE SYSTEM Average Number of Channels OVER 210 54 5S NFL SUNDAY TICKET Up13gwiSundiy YES No 2, during no nmm.

jPjgy float fataarioaapctyj MEGA MARCH MANIA Sitmrrllrxa1C8Scow vce as- TjrrlromoijBliywlorJiii. Regular Season Sports Subscriptions Limited WtmiWWMTWrthaTM Pay Per View Channels 50 6 OVER 5.6 Customers MILLION varies spent on such education, but 7 percent of $313.1 billion is a large lever for moving state and local education policies in directions that Washington favors. And money is not the full measure of the national government's impact on education. Consider school discipline. Last month, Al Gore endorsed a good idea, "alternative educational settings" special "second-chance schools" for children expelled from schools for disciplinary reasons.

However, one reason such schools are needed is that What also lies behind it is the therapeutic impulse. In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Who wants to be the next national school superintendent. the federal government has complicated the task of maintaining school discipline. To understand how this happened, see "Who Killed School Dis Source: Marketing Materials and PuMisned Research Just buy any DIRECTV System subscribe to TOTAL CHOICE' programming. On top of our great TOTAL CHOICE1 package, enjoy more than 50 FREE additional channels for 2 months.

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However, government has made matters worse. In 1969, the Supreme Court held that a school violated five students' constitutional rights when it suspended them for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The court said students do not shed their free-speech rights "at the schoolhouse gate" and schools cannot be "enclaves of totalitarianism." Thus did important matters of school discipline become federal cases. Thereafter, a principal who confronted, say, a student wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "WHITE POWER" or with a swastika had to construe the Constitution. Could the principal prove that the behavior was "significantly Did he want to litigate the question? ON INDIVIDUAL PRICES SAVE s200 fffllfR 519 flf-ON 3HUE IVV PROGRAMMING ON PROFESSIONAL SAUE MaOlMBBgB Education Act (IDEA), which requires schools to provide disabled children an "appropriate" education, within regular classrooms whenever that is possible.

The act addressed real needs of many mentally and physically handicapped students. But since, and partly because of, the passage of the act there has been, as Hymowitz says, an explosive growth in the number of children classified under vague disability categories such as "learning disability" and "emotional disturbance." Part of the legal definition of emotional disturbance is "an inability to build or maintain satisfactory Interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers." So children who are unruly, for whatever reason, can claim and litigate for protected status within schools that before 1975, would have had a freer hand to expel them. The IDEA arrived just as society was becoming suffused with the therapeutic impulse, which de-emphasizes free will and moral responsibility, and postulates social or physiological causes of behavior This engenders a search for pharmacological treatments, or such therapeutic "remedies" as role-playing games, breathing exercises and learning to "identify feelings" and "manage anger." What Hymowitz calls "the skittish avoidance of moral language" by the therapeutically inclined indicates an enthusiasm for behavioral techniques and an aversion to "inducting children into moral consciousness If School Superintendent Gore or Bush.wants school discipline that arises from a moral environment that socializes children, he should consider how schools stopped being moral rommumtiesand became cockpits for lawyers and playgrounds for therapists. George F. Will is a syndicated columnist in Washington.

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MO-tMS-SIM M0-M7-4401 MO-M1-UH MS-TSt-MIl MO-T01MM 4I1-TII-1MI hilucmluavi mini HO-nHill 1 The author of the June 13 Other Opinion article "The Advantages of Growing Up Italian" was erroneously identified as Lee Sataline. A similar article, whose author and original place of publication are unknown, has been circulating among Italian Americans for at least a decade. VISA V- 1.