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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

#271
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…

> 4. Nurses are the catch all for jobs. Not enough aides? Nurses do the work....

The nurses aides would argue that they do the majority of the frontline work while getting paid a fraction of what the nurses make, and get even less credit.

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

#272
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're paid a shit ton more. And because of that, more nurses are quitting to do the travel thing, which worsens the shortage and increases demand for travel nurses ;-) never seen an industry fuck itself over so bad. That's really the issue - healthcare has become an industry, not a profession.

The market... finds a way.

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

#273
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…

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.

Prioritizing profit corrupts the commitment to providing care.

Healthcare can be either care or industry.

Applying corporate values to a healthcare system leads to maximum wealth extraction from both providers and patients.

In this context innovation focuses not on the care part but on the extraction. The care is secondary.

How can anyone who cares be a proponent or coexist with a healthcare industry?

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

#274

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.

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…

You should educate yourself about how most of the western world manages to have a functioning semi social health care system. US is broken because of this blind fantaic faith in free markets deregulation simplifications.

The problem is a large swath of the population that believe in all earnestly that squeezing profit is some magical tool for a functioning economy.

Too bad US is so good at PR, this mind virus is wreaking havoc all over the world.

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

#275
post #87
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…

That is an interesting observation. I wonder how much of the advent of "talking over doing" is related to the development of mass/social media.

Influence can propagate so easily through mass media, meaning that it is now possible to generate enough business interest just through "hyping" (it's difficult to achieve this when messages have limited reach) --- combined with the fact that it is often cheaper and less risky to "talk" than to actually "do", we end up with a culture where hyping is preferred whenever possible.

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

#276
post #218

The number of people in the US who continue to defend the abhorrent health insurance system is absolutely mind-boggling. The level of brainwashing that pervades discourse about single-payer health insurance being some sort of communist plot is testament to some of th emost successful propaganda of all time. What's worse is it belies an ugly aspect of human nature (particularly pervasive in the US IME) that people abs…

Yeah it's wild how well the grift works. My coworkers want private insurance (because we get it) and oppose universal healthcare. I think generally people in the states are ok with a grift if it hurts poor people worse. Because of that literally everyone expects they are getting grifted at all times and trusts no one.

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

#277
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strong disagree.

Nurses are generally payed very well. This is a supply problem driven by increasing restrictions on nursing degrees and insurance.

Not enough nurses and high cost leaves hospitals understaffed and nurses overworked, leading to a feedback cycle.

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

#278
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This one is big for product designers. I think this is looking at the problem wrong. The problem is that implementing positive change in these systems is impossible for reasons far outside the control of any product designer or developer currently on the team. This software is old, has byzantine requirements, probably cut costs all over the place, and conceived in a board room without the benefit of an adequate dev…

> I think this is looking at the problem wrong. The problem is that implementing positive change in these systems is impossible for reasons far outside the control of any product designer or developer currently on the team. A developer working on something is different from a product designer. For product designer I don't mean a UI/UX developer. I mean someone empowered to design the thing. This is often a leader or…

I think what you're describing as the Product Designer who can get shit done would need to be at the VP or C level to actually accomplish this within an enterprise organization.

> I don't think the cost effective conversations are happening.

I think it would take years to overhaul these products and the conversations on that and how the price would roll down hill to the healthcare organizations have happened, and been summarily shut down.

I also think startups have tried to sell software via this value prop but have not managed anything close to feature parity or sales-org-maturity as the dominant enterprise players.

> This is an opportunity.

I think various startups and other organizations are trying but there is a reason enterprise-style organizations exist and dominant their various verticals.

Its not only about a good product, its about navigating painfully expensive sales cycles of multi-year or even near-decade, political wheeling and dealing at the municipal, state, and federal levels, dealing with compliance and legal liabilities etc.

> This is an opportunity.

Is it though? Hospitals still run. Yeah its expensive as hell, nurses are quitting, but I don't see the horsemen of the apocalypse quite yet. Healthcare outcomes are ok-ish. Young people are still entering the medical field as a viable profession.

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

#279

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.

Conflicts with patients and their families. Politicians claiming you are overpaid and your friends and family believing them. Increased responsibilities without increased pay, something experienced nurses really feel. I'm trying to think of how any of those can be solved with "technology" :-/

This I have to hear. What politician is claiming that nurses are overpaid?

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

#280
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…

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.

I've heard the same thing from mental health counselors and therapists. In wealthier areas many will just stop accepting insurance entirely and make people pay out of pocket to avoid all the insurance paperwork and requirements (some insurers require specific diagnosis to continue paying for services). If an insurer decides to not pay you? good luck. Now you need to throw hours of unpaid labor at them to get money you're owed.

Unsurprisingly, this means many normal people can't afford a therapist and they're getting harder to find.

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