nursing students be warned: don’t be surprised if one day, you’ll wake up and you see “laundry 101″ in your prerequisites.

i’m just saying…

my husband works at the behavioral health unit of a large county hospital. for cost cutting purposes, last sunday, as announced a few months ago, the nurses started washing and drying the patient’s clothes.

they have other patients but most of their patient population are homeless who are picked up from the streets by the police. most of them only have the clothes that they are wearing on admission.

previously, the hospital provided a pair of scrubs looking clothes for the patients to wear. after years of doing this, the administration figured out this is such a big waste of money, so they decided to stop supplying the clothes. since it is obviously inhuman to just let a patient wear the same clothes everyday, it was decided that their clothes should to be washed every other day.

so yeah, on top of the usual psychiatric nursing scope of practice, my husband and his colleagues are now required to collect each patient’s dirty clothes, loading the pair of pants, underwear and shirt to the washing machine, and loading them to the dryer.

one load per patient. 5 to 9 loads per night.

i do not know too much about numbers, but just looking at this picture up front makes me think there is no way this practice is saving them some money. the nurses became creative by thinking of ways to trick themselves to imagine that this is something they enjoy doing, yes. but cost cutting? please, can somebody with more mathematical or accounting brain cells explain this to me?

is it just us, because we are ignorant, that we thought this is something out of the ordinary? or does everybody agree with the adminstration and believe this is such a brilliant idea?

i’d love to hear your two cents. thank you.