Middle of the night nonsense

Ok, here I sit at work. The night is slow thus making it very long. This is a mixed blessing. Slow, long night for me = good night for the little babies I am caring for. Busy, fast night for me = very bad night for the wee ones. As you would expect, I'm trying to figure out how to get busy and fast for me without the little ones having to suffer. There is no good answer.

On another note HIPPA sucks!!! I can't be emphatic enough about this. For those of you that don't know what this is, it relates to patient privacy and various laws that have been enacted to protect this privacy. While I don't have a problem with the concept, I do have issues with the implementation. For instance, I spent over an hour tonight taking a test on how to protect patient privacy - a good third of that test related to software development and how information is transferred between software clearing houses. AND I CARE ABOUT THIS BECAUSE? Like this in any way affects how I do my job, or what I do with info gathered on my patients. Since when will I, as a nurse, ever have anything to do with software development, etc? Why not test me on info that would be pertinent to my job, such as, "Should I give patient info over the phone to people I don't know?" That would make more sense.

In any case, at the end there was a survey which had several multiple choice questions, but then there was a comment section at the end. Boy, did I comment! Just part of my comment included a phrase that went something like, "...senseless waste of time which could have been better spent at the patients bedside providing quality care..."

Ok, venting over.