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

Framed that way, this sounds terrible. But... the truth is actual health care outcomes for insured patients in the USA are extremely good. This holds in comparison to other nations, when corrected for GDP and patient income, etc...

"Insurance companies" are, at least in the narrow sense, doing what we pay them to do really well.

They may or may not be making things easier for nurses, which is a different metric. But nurses aren't their customers, we are. And we're getting a fairly good[1] product.

[1] Albeit extremely expensive relative to other nations.

- an attitude of "most patients are just trying to wring medications out of you" - an ego-hit of "if I didn't make the diagnosis, I don't want to help" (this applies to both patients coming in with a suspicion of what they have, or getting a diagnosis from another doctor) - burn-out/overworking, where doctors have a hard time managing all the different cases coming at them without dropping the ball here and there

It's not a simple, single-cause problem at all, but just want to provide an alternative point of view about patients who look things up or come in asking about a specific condition or diagnosis.

When I got my ADHD diagnosis after a quarter-century, I went in specifically asking about ADHD because I had seen some flags that made me think I might have ADHD. Contrast that with the people doctors screen out who are trying to get a stimulant prescription despite not needing it, and you have a situation where it's hard for doctors to tell who does or doesn't need meds, and where patients with actual conditions have to fight hard for those to be diagnosed.

Even in cases like POTS, which has no medication involved in treatment, just lifestyle changes, and yet people close to me who have POTS all had an uphill battle getting it recognized by anyone, especially doctors who could diagnose (disclaimer: sample size = 3).

My Wife is an ER nurse manager and while you have many self entitled idiotic patients that think they are staying in a resort versus visiting an ER, the patient satisfaction surveys is not very high in regards to the issue and why nurses are leaving.

My wife actually had a person complain that the ER did not have cow bells to call for a nurse (She claimed to be a retired nurse and they always had that for back up, lol) and they constantly complain how come they came in first for a stubbed toe, but another patient with a gunshot wound or heart attack is being seen first.

The bigger issue as why nurses are leaving the field from what she has seen and experienced is:

1. wages: The wages are beyond inadequate in certain nursing specialties and many have left to become traveling nurses or contracted nurses that get paid double the standard nurse pay.

2. Burn out: Besides covid, Hospitals Patient to nurse ratio is often exceeded and no accountability for the hospital to break those ratios. Nor any consideration for a high demand patient versus a low demand patient. Then when something goes wrong the hospital looks to pin it on the nurses. This was an issue before covid . but covid just added fuel to the fire.

3. BS. nurses get bs from ALL sides. They get bs from the patients and even more bs from upper management who set unrealistic process in place that is more concerned by hiding accountability and making things look good on paper than actual patient care. Then you had that whole BS covid movement crap calling nurses hero but besides lip service they did absolutely nothing for them. In fact they did the opposite. I know my wife had to fight the executives because they wanted to make nurses use their vacation time for sick time if they got covid. Their explanation for this that if the nurses got covid it was not likely from the hospital as the hospital takes extreme precautions to prevent it. The funny thing was that the same hospital spewing that BS also wanted nurses to not wear mask due to possible shortages at the beginning of covid. Insert the BS is to DAMN High meme here.

4. RaDonda Vaught's conviction. This is certainly not helping the case to get more nurses.

Hospitals are legally enforced local monopolies (look up Certificates of Need). Meanwhile, you might have a dozen choices of insurance companies, but they all suck because they have to take what the hospital billing departments give them and take the blame or risk being dumped by the hospital.

It'd also be enlightening for people in this thread to have hospital executives explain how they have some of the highest patient numbers in history yet they're hemorrhaging so much money their physicians had to take pay cuts.

Nurses, due to their profession having relatively low barriers to entry yet requiring years of operational knowledge to truly be effective, need collective bargaining. Nurses do strike, and nurse strikes are actively occurring on the U.S. West Coast. However, the unions they represent are small and have little power overall. For a strike to be successful you need solidarity from a majority of workers in the area you want to impact. You also need buy-in from the hospital/region that union nurses will provide superior care to non-union nurses. Something that's hard to do when your average executive thinks that the most complicated thing a nurse does is sticking a patient.