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Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

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Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#131

Post by FactualActuals »

duxup wrote: post #41
FactualActuals wrote: post #7

High stress environment, stagnant wages unless you're a travel nurse, underappreciated during the pandemic, and having friends turn on you because they associate you with some crazy conspiracy theory. These are all reasons I've heard of career nurses quitting and going into other industries.

I was under the impression that nurses were paid pretty well (generally speaking).

I don't think they are paid as well as they should be considering the need for most nurses now to be on-call 24/7 and dealing with the stress from patients and their families, and administrative bloat.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#132

Post by drnonsense42 »

birdmanjeremy wrote: post #84
phil21 wrote: post #17

While it's anecdote, every single peer in bedside medical care I know without exception has either left the field, or has immediate plans to as soon as student loan debt is repaid. The few older medical professionals in my family are simply sticking out the last few years until they can retire early. This was generally the case prior to pandemic due to how poor the work environment has become, but the pandemic seems…

I'm friends with quite a few nurses, primarily travel nurses, and not a single one is considering a change in career that I am aware of. Simply an anecdotal counterpoint and nothing more.

The other responder said the same thing, but to add, a traveling nurse I’m friends with , in Texas, gets paid 5k a week if he chooses to work and chooses where he wants to work. So again, this is like making a judgment about software development working conditions by using people rest and vesting at FAANG as an example.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#133

Post by hedora »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77
phil21 wrote: post #17

While it's anecdote, every single peer in bedside medical care I know without exception has either left the field, or has immediate plans to as soon as student loan debt is repaid. The few older medical professionals in my family are simply sticking out the last few years until they can retire early. This was generally the case prior to pandemic due to how poor the work environment has become, but the pandemic seems…

> How doctors of all professions lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators within a generation is quite puzzling and a bit terrifying to me. I have a lot of friends at various levels of healthcare, from nursing up through low and mid-level administrative positions. The one thing they all seem to agree on is that patient satisfaction surveys have been terrible for healthcare. Once the emphasis shifte…

That reminds me. I have one laying around to fill out.

10/10 plan to get sick again.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#135

Post by bkjelden »

vincnetas wrote: post #111
bkjelden wrote: post #56

Not surprising. My partner is a DNP and has pretty strongly considered leaving the entire profession. From my perspective, the entire healthcare industry is set up to treat any frontline worker without an MD after their name as completely expendable, nothing more than a row in a spreadsheet that can be optimized for middle management to hit next quarter's bonus targets. You can meet all metrics management sets out fo…

Do nurses have work unions? Would that solve the issue?

In some states, RNs working in hospitals are unionized. And that does help with some of the things I mentioned.

Outside of hospitals, and outside of RNs, unionization is much less common. E.g. in a clinic setting very few employees are unionized.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#136

Post by notch656a »

bpodgursky wrote: post #89
phil21 wrote: post #17

While it's anecdote, every single peer in bedside medical care I know without exception has either left the field, or has immediate plans to as soon as student loan debt is repaid. The few older medical professionals in my family are simply sticking out the last few years until they can retire early. This was generally the case prior to pandemic due to how poor the work environment has become, but the pandemic seems…

The shift to EMRs (more-or-less forced by the ACA) has been a huge quality-of-life loss for doctors. Tons of time spent on Epic or Cerner checking boxes and selecting drop-downs. Turned a "trusted professional" advisory role into a keyboard role.

There are medical scribes who will do all that for the physician and for dog-shit wages. Usually these are medical school-wannabes so they can easily be tricked into working for minimum wage, and once they're suitably trained the physician just has to briefly scan the EMR for completeness and sign off on it.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#137

Post by theguyovrthere »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #60
weatherlite wrote: post #13

Hard profession but one of the last things to be automated imo, guaranteed income for next 30-40 years. Don't think you can say the same about certain types of doctors for instance.

A friend who is an anesthesiologist said that he was retiring because the new machines were so good that no one wanted to pay for an anesthesiologist anymore. They were happy with a nurse. So you're right.

CRNA != Nurse in the same sense as a registered nurse in an ICU or med-surge department.

CRNA is the Nurse Practitioner version of Anesthesiologists.

They're paying for less anesthesiologists and hiring more Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist because they're cheaper, perform a sweeping majority of the same function, and multiple can be supervised by an anesthesiologist who is on hand to fill the small gap between theirs and the CRNA scope of practice.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#138

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77
phil21 wrote: post #17

While it's anecdote, every single peer in bedside medical care I know without exception has either left the field, or has immediate plans to as soon as student loan debt is repaid. The few older medical professionals in my family are simply sticking out the last few years until they can retire early. This was generally the case prior to pandemic due to how poor the work environment has become, but the pandemic seems…

> How doctors of all professions lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators within a generation is quite puzzling and a bit terrifying to me. I have a lot of friends at various levels of healthcare, from nursing up through low and mid-level administrative positions. The one thing they all seem to agree on is that patient satisfaction surveys have been terrible for healthcare. Once the emphasis shifte…

[deleted]

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#139

Post by PragmaticPulp »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #119
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How doctors of all professions lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators within a generation is quite puzzling and a bit terrifying to me. I have a lot of friends at various levels of healthcare, from nursing up through low and mid-level administrative positions. The one thing they all seem to agree on is that patient satisfaction surveys have been terrible for healthcare. Once the emphasis shifte…

Patient satisfaction surveys are the legible feedback mechanism showing that something is deeply broken, but not the source of the problem itself. It's clear from your comment that the source of the problem is the increasingly sharp divide between what the credentialed medical professionals believe and what lay people believe. The satisfaction survey is simply uncovering that fact. It would be vastly worse if patient…

That's the theory - That patient satisfaction surveys will uncover the bad providers.

But in the real world, if someone is receiving bad care they don't continue making followup appointments with that doctor. Nobody continues going back to the same bad doctor over and over again and writing negative reviews. It's really easy to calculate churn rate for individual providers.

The hot topic now is tracking outcomes: The idea is that with enough data collection and crunching, we can eventually start tracking which providers have better outcomes among their patients. This is one of those things that sounds great on paper but has a lot of challenges in the real world. It's also prone to gaming, as we've seen from surgeons who have learned to avoid difficult cases so they can avoid the risk of another patient death statistic.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#140

Post by woodruffw »

duxup wrote: post #113
woodruffw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nurses are paid well, relative to the average American salary. I don't think they're paid particularly well relative to the job's lifestyle requirements and latent stress levels, especially during a pandemic. Looking at my area (NYC), I'd have to take over a 50% pay cut from my engineering job to be "paid well" as a nurse. And I suspect my job is a lot less stressful.

That's not that usual of a dynamic. I think the "hardest" job I ever worked was a PC tech support call center or a job at a pizza place. I didn't pick my hours ... and the job was a heck of a lot harder than my coding job that pays WAY more. But it wasn't like I could just go and get a coding job at the drop of a hat.

Sure. Both programming and nursing are relatively niche fields. Nursing is arguably a significantly more professional field, given that (1) formal requirements are higher, and (2) Nurse Practitioners are effectively educated at the MS level (versus a BS or lower for the average programmer).

If we're using job difficulty and stress as some of our metrics for fair pay, then I would argue that tech support and pizza delivery should also be higher paying! But even with that, it doesn't seem unreasonable to factor in the professional qualifications (and corresponding time and money commitments) required of nursing. Relative to all three, it's a remarkably low-paying job.

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