02/01/05

LC050201

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Hospitals are clambering to hire them, but where can people go for a fast-track degree in nursing?

Bill Kenny>> They took one look at me and said you might be interested in the accelerated program (laughter). I'm a little bit older than some of my classmates. The idea of doing it in one year really appealed to me.

Val>> And then, a student from the Valley takes her video camera to the biggest tourist attraction in Poland, a Nazi death camp, and brings back a first-person account.

Those stories and more tonight on Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> For years now, we've been hearing about the nursing shortage and how it's putting patients at risk. But the problem is not people. There are plenty of people who would love to be nurses. And the problem is not doctors or hospitals. They're hiring nurses as fast as they can find them. The problem is in the training. There's a bottleneck and, as David Okarski tells us, there's one college that is doing something about it. It is offering adults a whole new career in a year.

David Okarski>> On the Doheny Campus of Mount St. Mary's College just south of downtown Los Angeles, Assistant Professor Rebecca Otin gives two advanced nursing students an impromptu lesson in patient relations. In the exercise, student Bill Kenny plays the patient, Jocelyn Chiapetta practices being a nurse.

Jocelyn Chiapetta>> "Do you think you want to take some medicine for that right now?"

David Okarski>> Bill and Jocelyn are eight months into Mount St. Mary's special one-year accelerated nursing program.

Jocelyn Chiapetta>> Very intense, no time for much else except for studying, which was a very different experience for me than my first four years of college.

Bill Kenny>> They took one look at me and said you might be interested in the accelerated program (laughter). I'm a little bit older than some of my classmates. The idea of doing it in one year really appealed to me.

David Okarski>> Bill is forty-five. He's an experienced television writer and producer of shows like "Big Brother", "The Newlywed Game", "Designing Women" and "Blossom".

Bill Kenny>> When I work on a TV show, we go on hiatus. So sometimes I'll be sitting around for three or four months waiting for my next show to come along and for the new season to start. I thought to myself, how can I make money during that time? So I needed to become skilled at something and this was really a good fit, nursing.

David Okarski>> Twenty-six year old Jocelyn had tried several jobs and ended up working for a veterinarian.

Jocelyn Chiapetta>> And I did that for a while and that is when I realized how much I enjoyed medicine and science. I started volunteering at a hospital and loved doing that and that's when I decided to apply to nursing school.

David Okarski>> Both Bill and Jocelyn already have Bachelors degrees. They'll graduate in May with another one, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. The accelerated degree program is a good fit for time-conscious students like these. For the rest of us, it's important for another reason.

Mary Wickman>> There's just not enough nurses here, so we need to bring in nurses from other countries. About fifty percent of the nurses here in California come from outside the state.

David Okarski>> Mary Wickman, Chair of Mount St. Mary's nursing program, says America's baby boom population is aging and needs more health care. At the same time, baby boom-aged nurses are approaching retirement. There are too few young people to fill the gap and women who traditionally have filled the nursing ranks have more career options now than their mothers and grandmothers did.

Mary Wickman>> Law and medicine became options for women also.

David Okarski>> For these reasons and more, America has a critical nursing shortage and here's the irony. Plenty of people want to be nurses. So many, in fact, that United States schools don't have room for them all and routinely have to turn people away.

Mary Wickman>> Back in the middle 1990's, there was a study that came out that predicted that we'd have too many nurses and a lot of schools started to downsize. Just about that time, that's when the needs of the nursing shortage really started to appear.

David Okarski>> A study by the U.S. Bureau of Health Professions predicts that, within five years, the demand for nurses in this country could exceed supply by more than ten percent. After that, the nursing shortage is expected to accelerate. By 2015, it could reach twenty percent and by the year 2020, without adequate solutions, the number of nurses needed in this country could exceed those available by almost thirty percent.

Mary Wickman>> You know, to me, yeah, that is a bleak picture.

David Okarski>> Already, the shortage means many nurses are working overtime and patient loads are often higher than they would wish.

Mary Wickman>> And at times, you know, patient safety can be compromised too.

David Okarski>> Politicians are well aware of the problems associated with the nursing shortage.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger>> "We eliminated delays of up to thirteen months for the state's licensing of nurses."

David Okarski>> A landmark California law went into effect last year, lowering hospitals' nurse-patient ratios. It was supposed to reduce nurses' patient loads even further this year from six down to five patients per nurse. But Governor Schwarzenegger says nurses and patients will have to wait three years for the six patient ratio to drop. The lower ratio would have forced hospitals to scrounge for more nurses already in short supply and it would have forced them to pay more overtime, pushing their costs higher.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger>> "Another thing every state needs is affordable health care for its citizens."

David Okarski>> A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says the nursing shortage "places patients at risk for increased illness and death".

[Film Clip]

David Okarski>> Part of the solution is here at Mount St. Mary's accelerated training program.

Jocelyn Chiapetta>> It's been challenging beyond belief. I mean, it's pushed me and it's made me realize what I'm capable of. I mean, there is something to be said too for condensing everything like back to back to back and having clinical experiences. I mean, you go so much during one week. It keeps everything very fresh in your head.

David Okarski>> I have to ask. Do you turn out a nurse of the same quality as someone who's been through a two or three year program? Is that possible?

Mary Wickman>> I think it totally is. You know, these students come to us with fantastic backgrounds and I think what speaks mostly to the quality of the graduates is their success with their license and exam and hospitals employ them and they love our graduates.

Bill Kenny>> And this is the best place to listen.

David Okarski>> In another important step to beef up the ranks, hospitals are encouraging men to become nurses too.

Bill Kenny>> There's nothing feminine or masculine about it. It's very neutral that way.

David Okarski>> Mount St. Mary's is a women's school, but does accept men in its nursing program.

Bill Kenny>> That's right. There are four of us out of about thirty-six students. They're a little bit different than I expected. There are some very butch guys out there being nurses. Like I said, there's room for everybody.

David Okarski>> Not everybody can afford nursing school. What is it costing you?

Bill Kenny>> It's about forty thousand dollars for the tuition, the books, and then, of course, you've got your living expenses.

David Okarski>> But once they pass their state certification, neither Jocelyn nor Bill expects trouble finding a job.

Bill Kenny>> You're guaranteed employment pretty much. You can work anywhere in the country.

David Okarski>> The need for nurses is so great that hospitals are helping nursing schools expand capacity.

Mary Wickman>> They're providing nursing faculty, providing space in the hospital for a skills lab.

David Okarski>> In fact, some hospitals even help nurses pay for their education.

Bill Kenny>> Some employers will contribute to your student loans and others will pay for your future education. You know, that's all part of your negotiating when you get a job.

David Okarski>> But even with hospitals' help, Mount St. Mary's and many other nursing programs still have to turn people away.

Mary Wickman>> I guess nursing education is unique too in that not only do you have classrooms, but you also have clinic training where the student has to go out to the hospital or clinic. You know, with all those nursing students going in, there's this certain limit as to how many can be educated at one hospital at one time.

David Okarski>> The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation commissioned a study that says the forces driving the nursing shortage won't yield to simple solutions. It says nurses are strategic assets in the struggle to keep us all healthy in the new millennium. It recommends improving nurses' working conditions and compensation, better recruitment and more educational opportunities like this. David Okarski for Life and Times.

Val>> The accelerated nursing program at Mount St. Mary's has grown dramatically over the years. Ten years ago, they had sixteen students. Next year, they'll have sixty. And I should say that I first heard about this program as a Trustee of Mount St. Mary's College.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val>> Love it or hate it, American society is the most consumer-driven culture on the planet. But despite all our affluence, material comforts and entertainment, why are we also the most stressed, depressed and anxiety-ridden? Could it be the way our brains are wired? That's what the Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA thinks. His name is Dr. Peter Whybrow and he's written a book called "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough". Patt Morrison talks with Dr. Whybrow about how human evolution may be playing a part in America's malaise.

Patt Morrison>> Peter Whybrow, Neuropsychiatrist and Director of the Semel Institute at UCLA, thank you for joining us on Life and Times.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> Thank you.

Patt Morrison>> The book's title is "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough". This really isn't so much a book as it is a diagnosis.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> (Laughter) Yes, that's true, that's true. Yes, it's the neurobiology of capitalism, as I sometimes call it. It's a way in which we've managed to create this wonderful pleasure palace for ourselves and now we're suddenly wondering what to do with it.

Patt Morrison>> At the same time Americans are inquisitive, they also flagellate themselves for eating too much, for wanting too much, for spending too much, and you have put it all together into a syndrome.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> I think there's a common thread there to the obesity, to the greed, to the material affluence that we have in it. It is, in fact, that we are now in a situation where no human being has ever been before. We have such an extraordinary amount to choose from in terms of technology, in terms of food, in terms of choice itself that we're actually now in a place where, from the evolutionary standpoint, we don't quite know what to do.

So the book really tries to say let's look at this as a common syndrome where we're potentially going to get addicted if we're not careful to all the wonderful things that we have here. America is first on the planet to have this syndrome and let's stand back and say what can we do that may be a little different from what we're doing? Because at the moment, we're driving ourselves into illness.

Patt Morrison>> In your profession, you're finding the medical manifestations that are the consequences of this mania.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> It's part of the same syndrome. If you look, for example, at anxiety and depression in cohorts of individuals and analyze it depending upon when they were born, there is much more anxiety and depression in individuals who were born after 1966 or 1970 than in the earlier cohorts.

And the other interesting thing now is that there's more in adolescence. There's more difficulty with drugs, more difficulty with anxiety and depression in those who come from affluent families where the income is over $150,000 other than the average income in America. So this mania, although it affects us all, is in part a disease of affluence.

Patt Morrison>> Of course, in the Declaration of Independence we read that we are guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now it seems that the pursuit has become the goal rather than the happiness.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> Well, the pursuit certainly is where we live. You're absolutely right. Of course, that original statement was the pursuit of property. They changed it, as you know, to happiness. But I don't think we really know what happiness is at the moment. We've confused pleasure with happiness. Now pleasure is a very distinct thing. You can get pleasure from drinking a glass of wine, but you have to repeat drinking the wine if you're going to repeat the pleasure.

Happiness is something else. Happiness comes from the integration of one's relationship with others. The thing that we all long for -- if you ask somebody what they want in life, they say, oh, I want more time with my family, I want to do this, I want to do that -- they don't talk about having a larger refrigerator or more glasses of wine. We've confused pleasure with happiness and I think in our frenzied pursuit -- because you're absolutely right. The pursuit is the thing -- in our pursuit, we've gone beyond happiness into this dysphoric mania and we're still looking for happiness. We don't know where it is anymore, but I'll bet you it's behind us.

Patt Morrison>> Los Angeles is the migrant city in a country of migrants and immigrants. When immigrants come to this country, they tend to drop their political baggage and some of their cultural baggage and yet we share, as our new shared cultural baggage, this mania, this obsession with acquisition.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> Yes, it's our greatest asset. It's potentially going to turn into our fatal flaw. The fact is that we are an extraordinary group of people. Only two percent of the world's population moves. The rest, ninety-eight percent, die within fifty miles of where they were born. So here we are, the largest collection of migrants in the world today and it's great fun living here, yes. I mean, we're exuberant, we're optimistic, we're --

Patt Morrison>> -- We're self-selecting.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> We're self-selecting, yes. We have this temperament which is driving us wonderfully, but on the other hand, this excitement and exuberance leads us into all sorts of complex, frenzied activities, into debt, into all sorts where the treadmill keeps going. I mean, the fact is that this type of frenzy, if it's sustained, it actually makes people sick and the mania makes people sick too. I think we have to stand back. We have to say, if we understand the neurobiology of the way people work, the way people are, are we going to try and fit into this light-speed culture as was said in one of the critiques of the book or are we going to actually change the culture to fit who we are evolutionarily in our evolutionary terms?

Patt Morrison>> How do you put a premium on compassion? You talk about in the book and yet it's a quality that, though we all think is important, it's generally derided. It has very little value in this country.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> That's a big problem. In fact, compassion is the essence of what most human beings want. If you ask somebody what you want in life, as I mentioned earlier, they will talk about things that relate to compassion. They don't talk about material goods. They don't talk about spending more time at the office. What they do is, they say I want to be closer to other people. But you're absolutely right. Our value system no longer reinforces that. Unfortunately, the reward system of the brain, which is what I talk a lot about in there --

Patt Morrison>> -- Oh, you talk about dopamine and instant gratification, the kinds of things you expect from sex and chocolate and wine.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> Exactly, the pleasure things. But that's a reward on an individual basis. It's not a collective reward. So we've built a society that reinforces the individual, but doesn't reinforce the compassion that you're talking about.

Patt Morrison>> You point out in the book that Darwin was familiar with the work of the political economists. What do you think are the evolutionary consequences of us continuing down this path?

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> Well, you can see it most easily probably in the area of food addiction. Seventy percent of the population are now overweight. Something like thirty to thirty-five percent are obese. The consequences of that in terms of evolution are that you begin to get what's called Type II diabetes. In terms of evolutionary consequences, what we're beginning to see on the physical side is a major detriment that could begin to reduce the length of life, just in that example.

Now in other examples, for example, greed and anxiety and so on, that disrupts the fabric of the social society so that we potentially -- not to be histrionic about it -- but potentially we could become a sort of third world country where you've got lots of very rich people and also very poor people. So the culture would begin to fragment and our wonderful vision of being the beacon of hope for the rest of the world would be in tatters.

Patt Morrison>> Peter Whybrow, Neuropsychiatrist and Director of the Semel Institute at UCLA, thank you very much. I feel much calmer now.

Dr. Peter Whybrow>> (Laughter) Thank you, Patt, very much. It's always a pleasure to be with you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> She's an Armenian student at Cal State Northridge and, with genocide a part of her own peoples' past, Arevik Taymizyan was interested in seeing a Nazi death camp. So when she had a chance to go to Poland, she visited Auschwitz. She took her camera along on the tour and this is what she saw.

Arevik Taymizyan>> I had always wanted to go to this place called Auschwitz, a place that I had heard and read about in school. I only had a vague idea of the former Nazi concentration camps, but the name Auschwitz still evoked in me images of the Holocaust, of gas chambers, cremation pits and crowded wooden barracks of the one and a half million people killed here. But these numbers, although impressive in a terrible way, seemed impersonal.

This past December, I finally had the chance to visit the site with a tour guide, Wojciech Smolon, to see for myself what really happened at Auschwitz. Much to my surprise, I was not the only one strangely intrigued by the thought of seeing the largest graveyard in human history. It turns out that the former camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau, are popular destinations in Poland. In fact, more than half a million people from all over the world visit the site every year and I had a chance to talk with some of them.

Monika Czarnik>> "This is my second time here", Monika says. "The first time I came with a group of girls from school. Today I brought with me my boyfriend who is German to see what happened. There is a lot of history here. It's important for everyone to see it."

Olivier Muneau>> "I came here because I think it's essential for us, for all, to understand what really happened here", he says. "We always hear about concentration camps, for Jews in particular, but as long as you haven't been here to really see it for yourself, then you can't understand or imagine what it was like."

Ralph Ness>> "This is a big part of history", he says. "Yes, it's kind of strange being touristy about it, but it's important to see it in real life rather than in books or movies. This is an important part of German history too and I have a great interest in that."

Maki Takahashi>> "I'm interested in World War II", Maki says. "I've learned about it in school. Now that I've had a chance to visit Poland, this was the first place I thought of visiting."

Arevik Taymizyan>> The site has become more popular with American visitors like myself perhaps because of movies like "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful". But when you see this place for yourself, you realize the movies don't come close to portraying the real horrors that took place here. What happened in Auschwitz during its five years of operation was nothing less than hell.

In 1941, the Germans embarked on what they called the final solution of the Jewish question, to systematically eliminate all of the Jews living in Europe. So they took the southern Polish town of Oswiecim and turned it into Auschwitz, a gigantic death factory. Wojciech explained to me why the Nazis chose this small Polish town of all places.

Wojciech Smolon>> Auschwitz became important because the town had very convenient, very good connections with Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Berlin, four central European capitals. It was very easy to organize deportations from practically every country in Europe and send these trains straight here.

Arevik Taymizyan>> There were five gas chambers and crematoria in the Auschwitz complex capable of killing thousands of people in one day. There is only one gas chamber left intact today and it was largely reconstructed by museum staff. SS men blew up the other four chambers and crematoria just before soviet troops arrived. They were trying to conceal their criminal activities, but they didn't succeed. You can still see the remains of the chambers on the camp grounds.

The majority of the deportees to Auschwitz were immediately gassed and cremated upon arrival, Wojciech told me. But on my tour of the camp, I also saw the photos of those who were not put to death. These prisoners were used as slave labor and were eventually worked to death. Others were used by the Nazis for medical experiments.

Wojciech Smolon>> On November 10, one of the SS men carried out sterilization experiments on Jewish women. He sterilized Jewish women with chemical injections trying to find quick, non-surgical methods for sterilization.

Arevik Taymizyan>> Seeing the pictures of children and women used as human guinea pigs was horrifying. You can walk around Auschwitz pretty freely. This is Block 11. It was one of the most feared blocks at Auschwitz, the prison within a prison. Here inmates were punished in cruel and unusual ways.

Wojciech Smolon>> Apart from other cells in which they kept prisoners who were being interrogated, they had here several types of cells for special punishment. This is one of the so-called standing cells. There were four through here, each of them about one square meter area. Four or five prisoners were taken to each of them. You can see that, to get inside, prisoners had to crawl in and then stand up. They would spend here one night and, in the morning, go to work. At the end of the day, they had to come back here. For food, these prisoners were given only bread and water, so many prisoners died here either out of suffocation or simply out of general exhaustion.

Arevik Taymizyan>> I was stunned to see how the Nazis, who had no respect for human life, had an immense appetite for material goods. This is what Soviet Army troops found after the liberation of the camp, seven tons of human hair in tightly packaged bags.

Wojciech Smolon>> They were useful in manufacturing materials which were usually used for military or industrial purpose.

Arevik Taymizyan>> Nazis carefully sorted and stored the personal belongings of the deportees and they kept meticulous records. The museum now houses many of the items found after the liberation, including artificial limbs of handicapped prisoners and eyeglasses. The collection also includes piles and piles of shoes. But for whom were all these belongings gathered, I wondered? Who would have the heart to wear the shoes of a young woman so mercilessly murdered? This is the monument on the grounds of the former camp, a monument to victims like her, to the one and a half million individuals that Nazis managed to murder at Auschwitz in less than five years.

In all, I learned much from my visit to Auschwitz. I saw the extremes to which human barbarity can go if unstopped. Of course, I'm no stranger to this. I'm an Armenian and I know the impact that genocide can have on a people. As I left Auschwitz, I asked myself if I would ever come back here again, but I probably won't have to because what I saw here today I will never forget.

Val>> Our thanks to CSUN student, Arevik Taymizyan, for sharing that story with us. And you can see the third part of the documentary, "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State", tomorrow night on KCET at nine o'clock. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

It was the wardrobe malfunction seen around the world, but has the campaign against indecency on television gone too far?

>> I think they're upset that all of a sudden now they have to recognize that there are limits and that's not a bad thing. Like I said, they can do whatever they want to do except air obscene material.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.