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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

#251

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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.

No one wants to hear the truth. There’s near-infinite demand for healthcare and a constrained (mostly artificially) supply. Insurance, people and government can’t solve the problem of the supply and demand by throwing money on it. You either expand supply or remove demand. Given removing demand is... not desirable. The only alternative to fix the issue is remove regulation and expand supply. That’s it. Insurance make…

I think there needs to be some new approach to how medical services are being paid for. My 70yo father fell off a ladder and drove himself to the hospital in Calhoun Georgia (2 hours north of Atlanta, a small town) with a bruised eye and a broken wrist. He got in late afternoon, left the next day, and the bill to insurance (which of course they won't pay) was $69,000... more than per capita income in the US. The system is ridiculous.

In my opinion, healthcare has reached the state where the people who receive the benefit are too far removed from the people who pay for it and given there is no "victim" of price gauging, the prices will just keep going up up and way.

I defer to those wiser than me for the solution. I don't like complaining without being constructive so here is my ignorant pass at it. This will require a few key steps: 1) Yes, we need more supply (by deregulating the profession) 2) I personally think a more effective solution would be to gradually eliminate insurance except for catastrophic risk (like emergency medical care from a car accident). #2 will shift responsibility to the individual and the system will be capped at what they can charge based on the average person's ability to pay for it (which is how it works in many parts of the world).

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

#252
post #92

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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.

Yes there are hospitals in India that cater to a specific aliment. For instance, eye hospitals, cancer centres, hospitals that cater to pregnancy, childbirth and neonatology etc.

> 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.

Not necessarily.

1. A heart surgeon is going to be doing heart surgery at more or less the same frequency regardless of whether the hospital they're at handles only heart patients or not. Wouldn't they?

2. I doubt if anybody here considers them cheap. Yes it's probably cheaper than in the US, but still it's rather expensive. But then again, since life is priceless, ...

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

#253
post #160

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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.

Poor pay? Judging by the nurses I have talked too in big proper hospitals stress and scheduling are their main concerns, not pay.

Obviously higher pay would increase their abuse tolerance, but I think it is only part of the problem and a short term solution since no amount of pay will offset stress problems.

County level nurses seem to have much better work conditions than hospital nurses.

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

#254
post #57

Most people work for money so I would take all this with a grain of salt. If you are a RN what are you going to do if not nursing? The same applies to all fields including Physicians.

Typically nurses are women. Typically women are married to men. Men worthy of a relationship or marriage to begin with typically have an income significantly higher than min wage, potentially capable of sustaining a family on his own. Nurses are women usually and women have options, usually.

This comment is kooky. Are you implying that one option for women nurses is marrying a higher-income man and becoming a stay-at-home spouse?

Men making less than the median for their gender (something like $55k in the US) are still marriageable; plenty of women marry men who can’t support families on their salary alone. Even at the median salary, supporting two people — let alone a larger family — could be a struggle, depending on debts and other commitments.

And then there are women who are not married to a man who makes money, either because they remain unmarried or because their husband has lost his job or cannot work for some reason.

Further, even if the cards align, it’s not great to be in a position of dependence on your spouse's salary. Sometimes you have to split up and sometimes your spouse dies without leaving significant insurance or inheritance.

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

#255
post #64
post #46

I've spent a fair amount of time talking with nurses about the problems. I'm related to a bunch of people who are nurses across disciplines (ER, ICU, med/surg, etc). It's been enlightening hearing them talk about the problems... 1. Many new nurses make the same or more and long time nurses. It's frustrating when the nurse in charge with the most experience is making less than new nurses. Some hospitals are even tryin…

> 2. Patients in COVID have become downright mean. Add this to the problems nurses have management and doctors (who are often rude and arrogant) and it's a poor culture. The quality of the environment, from a mental health standpoint, is on the decline. Mean customers, and rude coworkers? I sympathize, but this is a reality in a lot of industries. I have no reason to believe that healthcare here is worse than average…

All customer-facing positions have to deal with rude customers. Very few of those positions specifically select for customers with a high correlation to selfish and/or antisocial conspiratorial behavior. Almost all COVID hospitalizations are unvaccinated, and there's a very large (if not majority) portion among that population that chose not to vaccinate for entirely selfish reasons, and another large portion who have been actively consuming media telling them the members of the medical profession are the enemy. You'd be hard pressed to select for a more adversarial customer base.

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

#256

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

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Sure, but that's like blaming "humanity" for all the woes of the health care system. It's humans who produced the health care system in the US after all.

You have to be more precise as there are clearly aspects of capitalism that have resulted in tremendous improvements in quality of life (look at North Korea vs. South Korea).

Regulatory capture is one of the issues & revolving door politics. Especially a big problem in the healthcare & finance industries (the current head of the SEC spent his career at Goldman Sachs for ex.)

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

#258
post #87

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> 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…

I recently saw a good talk about this point.

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

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

#259
post #102
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Patients in COVID have become downright mean. Add this to the problems nurses have management and doctors (who are often rude and arrogant) and it's a poor culture. The quality of the environment, from a mental health standpoint, is on the decline. Mean customers, and rude coworkers? I sympathize, but this is a reality in a lot of industries. I have no reason to believe that healthcare here is worse than average…

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Health care seems to be part of the institutions that are of no use to certain cults. It's part of the effort to dismantle the administrative state and reserve health care for the 1%.

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

#260
post #3

The survey sample was 200 RNs in the USA.

I wish there was some law requiring surveying companies to fully disclose their method of contact and compensation. I can absolutely see an employee looking to leave their job being more receptive to taking a survey. Those happy with their jobs are not as likely to respond to third-party entities like " Hospital IQ " contacting them. Maybe the survey company masked this survey as a "pre-screen" to finding new jobs! W…

Nursing is a underappricated underpaid job, but we can't get 90% of people in this world to agree that the sky is blue.
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