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Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

cnn.com

211–220 of 335 posts

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company cares about you, it is shown in money. The People and Culture guy is a snake oil salesman meant to scam you.

FWIW, there was a post by an ICU nurse in my local subreddit who said that NOBODY took advantage of extra available shifts even though the hospital was offering double pay. Her point was for many medical personnel, it's not about money, it's about being exhausted and burnt out.

Bump it up to 10x, and then 100x. Of course, money is just a means to an end, so if the amount of money being offered is not going to achieve one’s goal, then it is useless. If that goal is increasing one’s quality of life by either earning so much that you can quit, or by hiring more people so that you do not get burned out, either way the answer is money.

However, the bedrock of our society has been a growing working age population that is OK with meager wages and quality of life at work, allowing us to lives more luxurious than otherwise could be. This dynamic should change once the working age population decreases relative to the old age population who need the services.

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#212
post #95

I suspect one could go a long way towards solving this by announcing that unvaccinated covid cases will get zero health insurance coverage. Make exceptions for those that truly cannot be vaccinated but to hell with everyone else. Going further, make society difficult to navigate for people unwilling to be vaccinated or wear masks and our frontline workers will have much better lives. Why are we compromising our quali…

In a socialized medicine country, I'd understand this argument. However, in a private medical system, there's no reason for this. If an unvaccinated person can pay, they ought to be treated. It's their money.

And private insurance has a long history of denying claims. How is this any different?

https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Forms-Reports-and-Other-...

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#213
post #7

I am an EMT and talk to a lot of nurses, PAs, and physicians in various circles. This wave is worse for a few reasons. - Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves. Nobody can muster any more compassion, especially for these people. Patients and people at large, not even just the total-nutjob anti-vaxxers, are tired of restrictions. "…

> Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves. That seems strange to me considering there are TONS of diseases that are completely the victims fault. Diabetes, heart diseases, lung issues, etc can all be caused because someone chose to make unfortunate decisions. Why would you get into a profession where you're in contact with this kin…

If I could take two shots that prevented me from having Heart Disease and never having a heart attack that kills me, I would get those two shots.

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#214
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Century old standard set by drug addicted doctor, continues to this day despite the evidence proving it foolish and dangerous. Funny tradition that refuses to die.

I'm not sure what this comment is steeped in beyond a lack of reading on the topic.

He's referring to William Halstead, whose cocaine habit let him work long hours without sleep, and who was one of the instrumental figures in developing the modern medical residency system (with its brutally long hours):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#215
post #7

I am an EMT and talk to a lot of nurses, PAs, and physicians in various circles. This wave is worse for a few reasons. - Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves. Nobody can muster any more compassion, especially for these people. Patients and people at large, not even just the total-nutjob anti-vaxxers, are tired of restrictions. "…

The rate for traveling nurses is indeed ridiculously high as compared to full-time on the ground nurses working their butt off.

Are the traveling nurses also not working their butt off?

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is an out group constantly endangering the well-being of others? It really is one. Or if it isn't, then what exactly is it? Your body, your choices, your consequences, but not mine or anyone else's. Why is the right to dodge vaccination and masks so important, so absolutely vital, so incredibly on target that we risk the destruction of the Republic itself if we mandate them? Do you also support my right…

I sincerely believe this hesitancy issue is designed to identify people as offside and as a wedge issue or scissor statement, and not as discourse to derive facts about the topic. Blaming the hesitant and making histrionic claims is like trying to convince me of some eugenic racist theory, where it's just a fast filter that repels everyone intelligent enough to disagree with you and leaves you with a remainder of eas…

So it's not the pandemic that both Republicans like Schwarzenegger, Democrats like Obama, and billionaires like Bill Gates predicted and tried to plan for 5 to 15 years ago? It's some weird social agenda to isolate the free thinkers? Okey-dokey then.

But I support them being the control group for the vaccine as well. We don't need that control group anymore we have plenty of data but hey it's a free country. But that choice comes with responsibilities that they don't want to accept and that's where I have a problem. If you're going to sequester yourself away and harm no one but yourself, good for you.

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#217
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, every hospital director needs at least three vacation homes and two boats right?

We have this whole additional trillion-dollar industry that other countries don't .. nearly every dollar of our healthcare spending flows through insurance companies who add zero value to actual health care but have hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of billions in salary to pay. Health insurers know their time in the crosshairs is coming which is why they're buying up pharmacy groups and providers, to g…

Health insurers (better called managed care organizations) are politically locked in.

Politicians get to use them as scapegoats, and there is no way voters in the US accept taxpayer funded healthcare. Someone has to be the bad guy and allocate the limited amount of healthcare resources available, and I see no reason why the existing relationship of government makes the rules allocating the care, but MCO implements them and takes the heat would change.

Traders also seem to think the same given the gains in MCO market caps. Also, all the MCOs have profit margins of 5% or less, so this game of punting responsibility costs relatively little in the grand scheme of things.

At the root of it all is a demand for healthcare that far outstrips supply, and so these obfuscations are useful in making sure certain socioeconomic classes are able to attain a greater share of it than others.

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#218

I know someone who works in hospital / physician group admin that said doctors are straight up quitting right now unless the hospital bends to their demands to only work 3 days a week. They can't hire doctors either and they have no way to accept new patients at the moment.

Seems reasonable, depending on shift length. Some doctors work 24 hour shifts, three 24 hour shifts a week would be brutal. Even three 12 hour shifts would be 36 hours, not much less than a standard 40 hour week.

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are not enough nurses, and aren't enough doctors sitting idle right now to hire up in the way that you're suggesting... and if you thought spinning up a chip fab in Texas is taking too long, wait until you try to solve the problem of spinning up more doctors. the residency program that takes up years of their schooling relies on having other doctors mentor them.

There's actually an enormous abundance of nurses in the US. One in 100 people is a registered nurse. The nursing shortages are entirely due to the fact that these nurses have left bedside care due to the BS they have to deal with from understaffing, poor compensation, terrible shifts/hours, to abusive management and patients. The "nursing shortage" is as much a myth as the current labor shortage. There's only a short…

Anecdotally, I have at least 7 family/friends that were RNs at some point and moved on to other professions or dropped to part time. Zero of my family and friends are still full-time RNs. They cite a combination of reasons: risks from patients (moving overweight people, assault from patients, verbal abuse from patients/families, etc), increased workloads that threaten their licenses, and cost of childcare. And this all occurred before COVID.

Re: Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is fear mongering. The fatality rate of COVID, even at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't even have proper metrics, was never measured to be more than about 7-8%, which is very high, but not 35%. The paper you cite is about a hypothetical. Stop with the fear mongering.

The IFR seems to be about 1% now that we a have a lot of data, and a bit higher in the US. But that could change or are you asserting it won't? And are you completely unconcerned about new variants? We'll have to disagree on that. The Delta variant has saturated ICUs again, no problemo I gather? And you're misrepresenting the paper. It doesn't claim 35% fatality, it cites the 35% fatality of MERS, a distantly related…

> But that could change or are you asserting it won't

How can you interpret what I wrote to say that a new virus or variant certainly won't cause a higher fatality rate? Anything can happen at any time. For all we know, a new virus could become prevalent. Typically though, we base public policy based on things that have already happened and the likelihood of future things.

There is little reason to believe COVID will evolve into something more deadly. In general viruses rarely make this evolutionary step. Pathogens do not gain reproductive advantage by killing their host. This is why zoonotic pathogens are so dangerous ... when such a pathogen crosses over, they can go from causing no damage to their original host (bats) to becoming very deadly in the context of a human body. Indeed, if history is any guide, endemic human viruses eventually evolve to be mild infections or beneficial (there are theories that placental development is due to the presence and integration of ancient viruses in mammalian DNA).

Given that, unlike the flu which has natural reservoirs in birds and crosses over very frequently to humans, COVID does not seem to be bouncing between animal hosts, it is highly unlikely based on every understanding I have of pathogenic evolution that the virus will become more deadly. Indeed, delta variant, while more infectious (as to be expected) is not as deadly.

> . It doesn't claim 35% fatality, it cites the 35% fatality of MERS, a distantly related coronavirus

Except, MERS and SARS-Cov1 are zoonotic viruses, whereas the COVID variants are human evolved and thus unlikely to become more pathogenic. Zoonotic viruses evolve to be less deadly in their hosts. The zoonotic crossover is a chance event and given the viruses were evolved to not kill bats, they had not been exposed to any selective pressure to not kill humans. Now they are exposed to that pressure so we will see the fruits of that selection.

Also, as you point out, MERS is only distantly related. If this pandemic were MERS with a higher infection rate, then it would have been more concerning to begin with, but of course then it would also have evolved faster to be less pathogenic because the selection pressure would be stronger. But it's not. Even the earliest estimates (again, with assuredly bad data) were a fatality rate of 7-8%. They've gone drastically down, by orders of magnitude, and the new variants will continue to drop that.

It is good new variants are being created. The higher infection rate + lower death rate will lead to quicker herd immunity against a broader spectra of Sars-COV2 family viruses.

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