Theresa Brown's Essay 'When No One Is On Call'

In response to hospitals being under staffed with nurses, Theresa Brown argues that hospitals must have a sufficiently large nursing staff in her article “When No One Is on Call”. She effectively builds her argument by using personal anecdotes and statistics. Brown begins the speech by recalling a personal story when she was in nursing school with understaffed busy nurses. A patient needed their pain medicine dose adjusted, the patient’s pain subsided, but the patient experienced shortness of breath and low oxygen levels. Brown informed the patient’s nurse that the patient needed narcan to reverse the impact from the pain medicine. Upon being informed of the situation “the nurse didn’t have time for that. Caring for eight patients on a busy

Since “nurses are the hospital’s front line” and the nurses’ attention is sprawled out among eight other patients it is difficult for the nurse to give the best care and undivided attention for each of her patients. In addition, Brown includes another personal anecdote where there was a sufficient staff of nurses. Brown started a new job and suddenly heard her name being called “a patient getting a drug that can cause dangerous reactions was struggling to breathe. I hurried to her room, only to discover that I wasn’t needed. The other nurses from the floor were already there.” This demonstrates that with a situation where the immediate availability of nurses is required for a patient’s condition it is important that the nurses are well staffed. She builds this argument that hospitals must have sufficiently larger nursing staffs by using comparative personal anecdotes. In Brown’s first sight where a nurse failed the patient the nursing staff wasn’t adequately staffed which caused the patient to have a emergency team to bring her back to life. However, in Brown’s second personal story which features a sufficiently staffed floor of nurses. The patient had called for Brown’s