Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

healthcareitnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 1001 posts

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

#201

Post by jwagenet »

mfer wrote: post #160
birdmanjeremy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 travel nurse market is growing due to supply and demand problems. The demand for nurses is increasing as people are leaving and there are more from the boomer generation hitting an age where they need more care. The supply has stayed the same. Schools local to me have not increased output for various reasons (lack of instructors, lack of space in local hospitals where nurses train, etc). The supply is too low. So…

No, the solution is to pay nurses better. There are already tons of high quality nurses who don’t want to do it anymore because of poor pay in the face of demanding hospitals and patients.

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

#202

Post by slantedview »

wolf550e wrote: post #130
pc86 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance is the only industry where they agree to pay for something (in this case, "medical care"), but then after service has been rendered can decide to pay less, or not pay at all, or stop paying that provider altogether, etc. This combined with hospitals being run by non-physicians*, and people thinking being able to Google and read WebMD qualifies them to argue with their doctor about treatment plans**, healthc…

re: "Medical decisions need to be made outside of cost considerations." In the end, labor hours of professionals are finite. Even if you don't need to pay doctors, you only have so many, they can only work so many hours, you will need to prioritize who to help in what way, which procedures to do. Same with all the other personnel, the consumable stuff, the devices/scanners/equipment, etc. So someone is going to have…

> labor hours of professionals are finite.

This is why it makes no sense to have doctors and nurses waste time battling insurance companies over treatments, and hospitals over staffing. Their time is indeed too valuable.

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

#203

Post by chimprich »

My wife is a nurse in the NHS. She actually saves people from cancer, or at least prolongs their lives. Her work is difficult, with huge responsibility. She gets a pay cut this year in real terms.

I make slight improvements to computer systems. In most of the jobs I've done, despite my best efforts to work for reasonably ethical companies, I've not been convinced I've made anyone's lives better. Yet my salary is 2-3 times hers.

I find it hard to believe there can't be a better way to arrange this kind of stuff.

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

#204

Post by pessimizer »

They'll leave with the teachers. Female-coded professions being derided for political capital as often as "inner-city crime" might tempt one to wonder which came first, the female-coding or the disrespect.

Just kidding. Teachers used to almost all be male until public schooling and the resultant budgeting turned them female (to pay them less.) It's like reverse computer-programming where the profession turned male when they started paying more.

Pay them and they won't leave. Pay them a lot, and dudes will start writing essays about how the reason women aren't being hired and are leaving the profession is because they naturally have less of an interest and aptitude for nursing than males.

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

#205

Post by tristor »

api wrote: post #87
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…

> lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators You just summarized the decline of Western civilization in one phrase. This has happened almost everywhere and efforts to push back have proven extremely difficult. I personally place a lot of the blame on the educational system for overproducing administrative skill sets and underproducing practical skill sets. There is some role for those things of cours…

Pretty much. Unfortunately, we've also created a massive underclass in the West who have effectively no applicable skills. They can neither administrate, or do things, and so they are effectively dead weight on society. Ironically, considering that administrators are driving us over the cliff, the underclass is less problematic than the administrators. At some point we'll hit a critical mass and there will be so few people left that know how to do things that we literally will be unable to maintain the basic infrastructure of civilization. The cracks are already starting to show.

The sad thing is that this is so very obvious, and yet such an intractable problem to solve. The entrenched systems at every level of society will fight you at every turn when you try to improve things.

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

#207

Post by LewisVerstappen »

dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #166
germinalphrase wrote: post #55

I have a close relation that works for one of the oldest pediatric hospitals in the country. It was recently revealed that they will be shuttering almost all pediatric services in the next year because they can 10x their profits by only serving elderly clients. The entire purpose of this organization was to provide pediatric healthcare, and it wasn’t losing money… Sometimes, it feels like we’re min-maxing ourselves t…

[flagged]

The healthcare system in the US clearly has nothing to do with free markets considering how unbelievably opaque and regulated everything is.

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

#208

Post by ProAm »

pc86 wrote: post #94
birdmanjeremy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Travel nurses are compensated quite a bit more in my understanding. And the travel aspect means they can leave the more toxic locations more easily.

A travel nurse means you just have to work across town you dont have to travel out of state, out of country, or to middle of nowhere. And these people are bringing in 5k a week currently. None of them are leaving.

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

#209

Post by mikkergp »

mfer wrote: post #92
brightball wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies. Everything is controlled by insurance companies. You can’t do anything unless it’s exactly how insurance wants and only for what insurance will pay. It limits everything, including how every profession can be compensated simply because you can’t easily hire somebody for more than what insurance will pay for their services. You can, but the funds have to come from somewhere.

In the book The innovator's prescription: a disruptive solution for health care by Clayton Christenson, there are some good analysis of where the complexity and problems come from in the current US medical system. A lot of it has to do with size and the complexity that goes along with it. So, as hospitals get bigger, do more, and increase in size and complexity these issues become worse. The economics math even mirro…

I think this alludes to it, but it's one thing mentioned in one of Atul Gawande's book is that in India they have hospitals that focus on one thing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-indias-no-frills-hosp...

So like a 2000 bed hospital just for heart surgeries. Like you're saying, the more a heart surgeon specializes, the better they are at it and the cheaper they can do it. Better Outcomes for less money.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

reedjosh wrote: post #70
salt-thrower wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How doctors of all professions lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators within a generation is quite puzzling The profit model of the U.S. healthcare industry might have something to do with it. The fact that hospitals are run like businesses and have shareholders is insane to me. I know other countries' healthcare systems got hit hard by the pandemic too, but it seems like the uniquely capitalis…

If they can't throw some medication with pharma kickbacks at you, they probably won't do much at all. My 6 month old son was put on topical steroids for a small rash on his back and the doctors solution when this turned into a progressive issue was more and stronger topical steroids. Eventually I learned about topical steroid withdrawal, and after a hellish withdrawal period, my son has no real skin conditions. https…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN