nabeepchen

A great op-ed in the NY Times today about a smoking ban in Spain. I guess many of the people there still have vivid memories of Franco, and bristle at anything or anyone who tries to muscle in on their democracy and freedom to make their own decisions.

As I’ve said before, I find many of the smoking ban intrusive, especially in bars where people come to engage in such “healthful” behavior. I find them intrusive in not permitting owners to decide whether or not an establishment should be smoke-free, or smoker friendly. Certainly there can be guidelines, as Spain was forced to concede to, but I think prohibiting smoking in the work place, when one has a private office, really goes too far. Or not allowing people to smoke in the outdoor area of a cafe.

FOR far too many years, almost 40, the people of Spain were treated like minors by Franco’s dictatorship. But it seems that some people among us still yearn for that era. The new antismoking law in Spain, which went into effect with the new year and bans smoking in workplaces and restricts it in many bars and restaurants, is a case in point: it is a clear example of the state trying to regulate citizens’ private lives and customs. As such, it is a measure that is far more befitting of Franco than a democracy.

I suppose this does have more meaning for a nation where democracy is a new and precious commodity. The author and others like him see this move as symbolic of a government trying to take control of very private affairs.

Now, I should say immediately that I am a smoker, like nearly a third of my fellow Spaniards, and I’ve never tried to quit. I know smoking isn’t good for my health, but neither is walking in the polluted streets of Madrid or Barcelona, nor is living in a world where the United States refuses to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol.

Yes, he is absolutely correct. Of course, smoking simply adds another layer to these health and environmental problems, but why not concentrate efforts on cleaning up the air, or controlling greenhouse gases? Answer: Too complicated, too time consuming. It’s easier to pick at cigarette smoking. That is the new cause celebre. The new antidote for all that is wrong.

Indeed, to escape the taint of hypocrisy, Spain would have to match its new antismoking measures with an array of others fighting everything else in the world that is at all harmful. Nowhere have I ever heard, for example, that cars are obliged to carry, just above the driver’s-side door, a warning, like those on cigarette boxes, that “Driving a car may cause death, grisly amputations, quadriplegia and involuntary manslaughter.”

Can you imagine putting that on cars? But yet, he is right. Cars are extremely dangerous. Driving is a major health hazard, worse than smoking. Aside from the fact that automobiles are also major polluters.

Anyway, a very interesting view of the smoking law. It came out today in the New York Times.

Hospital association says nursing shortage is serious

I kid you not. This is the title of a short article appearing on WISTV.comfrom Columbia, South Carolina.

Greenville-AP) January 14, 2006 - The head of the state’s hospital association says South Carolina is in the middle of a serious shortage of nurses and other health workers.

Is this dork journalism or what? I mean, reading these articles about the great nursing shortage of the new millennium is about as weary as reading the oversensationalized stories of the bird flu. We know, for example, that there is bird flu in Asia. We know that it transfers to people who play with infected chickens and suck their blood. Yes, it spread to Turkey, a primarily rural nation where people keep chickens, ducks and geese in their backyard. So out of a nation of 60-70 million, 21 people came down with bird flu. All from rural areas who had chickens running through their house.

In Turkey, they had a grand total of four deaths. Now, here’s a typical article that you see in the news, which tries to sensationalize the death rate, rather than put in in perspective. I pulled this sentence from Ireland on-line: The virus has jumped from poultry to people, killing at least 79 people in east Asia and Turkey since 2003. Wow, 79 people in two years. More children die of diarrhea every day. It is estimated that there are between 300 and 500 million new cases of malaria each year, resulting in over one million deaths annually. But do we hear much news about malaria?

Anyway, I was using the bird flu reporting–most of which is really bad–as an example of the twisting facts and presenting them in a distorted fashion. This little article about the nursing shortage in South Carolina supercedes anything that I’ve seen on the bird flu. From that first paragraph, it implies that the hospital association has just noticed that they have an insufficient number of nurses. They noticed that on Jan 14, 2006!!! Kudos to them!

Now, read on. There is more hot news coming.

Thornton Kirby said Friday that the problems will only get worse as the state’s population ages.

Kirby is president of the South Carolina Hospital Association. He told a meeting of reporters and editors from The Greenville News that quality won’t improve until the numbers get better. He said without an adequate supply of nurses, hospitals will have to change how they deliver care.

Well golly gee, Tom, we’ve known that since the days of Florence Nightingale. Lack of qualified healthcare workers===lack of good care. That issue has been studied, re-studied, and analyzed to death. So what do you plan to do about it? Are you going to raise nursing salaries, which tend to be somewhat pitiful in the South? Are you going to ban mandatory overtime, stop demanding that nurses work overtime for straight pay, start to treat them with respect, give them decent and safe assignments, fire incompetent and dangerous managers, hire sufficient security in the hospitals, hire sufficient ancilliary staff and train them, and give nurse more power as their schedules? Oh, I almost forgot–benefits and pensions?

Of course, I am dreaming to think that a hospital association would ever come up with that type of solution. No, they’re focused on the assembly line solution. Manufacture nurses as quickly as possible, and glue them in place once they’re on the job.

The trade group believes that while hospitals in South Carolina provide significant financial support to state institutions for health-care education, additional funding for state universities and technical colleges with programs in nursing and allied health professions is needed.

Additional funding for nursing education….sigh sigh sigh. The beat goes on…