Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

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…

Yes. The system is gross. When my dad suffered from a stroke (pre-COVID), the level of neglect and poor care he received was startling. He died before he should have after making substantial recovery due to the side-effects of being in a hospital.

My mom was a long-retired medical director of a hospital and even she was shocked at poor quality of care, compassion and competence. Even in the ER of a recognized trauma center, things were pretty meh. Some specialist floors and ICU were good, but when an infection caused by poor hospital hygiene struck, he was relegated to the “medical” floor, where he was not fed, medicated, turned or treated with respect. Ultimately we maintained a 24x7 staffing of family volunteers for over 6 weeks.

Many of the staff frankly sucked. But it was easy to see why - the staffing levels were so poor pre-COVID, that any RN risks license every day by virtue of being there. The smart ones GTFO. You can’t care for 15 patients.

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

#302

Post by thr0wawayf00 » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

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…

Doctors aren't happy about it either.

I was at my family's Easter lunch last week and one of my uncles who's an MD was telling me about the mass exodus of doctors from the profession since COVID hit. Anyone who was thinking about retiring did so once the pandemic took off.

He then tried to convince me that I'm not too old to go to medical school. Yeah, no thanks.

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

#303

Post by bitsnbytes » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #39

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…

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.

Insurance companies is a symptom of the REAL issue.

Unfortunately the American public hasn't figured out what the real issue is yet. They reason why they haven't is mostly because the Democrat party , Republican party, entertainment industry , the Main Stream Media, tech industry, and the the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has them occupied with the symptoms of the REAL issue in order to keep them chasing their tails.

The REAL ISSUE why healthcare isn't getting fixed is because of Conflict of interest.The American public hasn't figured out that going to congress who is riddled with conflict of interest and who designed the existing system that we have in place and is benefiting from it, might not be the best idea to fix healthcare.

In fact the best thing to fix healthcare (and the other 99 problems)is to STFU about it and focus ONLY On reducing conflict of interest in congress. Until we reduce conflict of interest in congress nothing will be fixed.

The Democrat party ,republican party, CPD and MSM want you focused on everything but reducing conflict of interest in congress. In order to fix healthcare and any of the other issues we must FIRST try to minimize conflict of interest by implementing the following as a start:

1. Term limits

2. Closing or reducing revolving doors between private and public sector.

3. No private campaigning contributions. Use tech to overcome the need of money.

4. Reform lobbying by doing away with the money aspect of it and utilizing technology to get your voice heard.

5. Pay congress members more and better benefits, but in return demand complete transparency from financial information to limitations in investments , NCA , and make pay and benefits tied to the general overall approval of congress by the American tax payers.

6.etc

Both party and the MSM solution to fix healthcare is the equivalent of going to the MOB and asking them to fix crime in your neighborhood which the MOB is benefiting from and is promoting. It just makes no sense to talk solutions with people riddled with conflict of interest.

You want to fix healthcare stop talking about healthcare and get the individual republicans and individual democrats to put their political ideology on hold and join forces to demand that their party ONLY focuses on reducing conflict of interest in congress.

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

#304

Post by advael » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #287

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…

> * I strongly believe that only physicians should be running hospitals. Strong disagree. This same attitude pervades the military ("only pilots should run the air force") and really all it does is that lower representation of the interests of the other non-pilot 90% of your organization and put a pilot bias on every decision being made.

Those are extremely different situations and you’ve not really justified why they’re being compared. A “doctor bias” in every decision being made would ideally prioritize health outcomes over decisions made for profit or convenience. It’s possible that doctors will make poor decisions too, but on balance our expectation based on their training is that decisions made because of healthcare outcomes would be more likely in this scenario than the current state of affairs, which prioritizes economic considerations as administrators in every context currently tend to

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

#305

Post by ironmagma » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

manuelabeledo wrote: post #51

JaimeThompson wrote: post #9

Perhaps allowing modern MBAs to cost optimize most every single thing we do isn't the best way to assure mid and long term security and profitability.

Maximising profit by cutting down wages and personnel is not a MBA specific problem.

It is a problem fostered by that culture though.

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

#306

Post by mikemac » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

mfer wrote: 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…

Agree with all of this, and just to add one thing: liability.

Look at the RaDonda Vaught case or the Michelle Heughins case; terrifying to be looking at jail time for a med error.

Many nurses are watching these cases more closely and deciding that since staffing isn't getting any better and they won't be protected, it's not worth the risk.

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

#307

Post by defterGoose » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

bitsnbytes wrote: post #245

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…

profit model is not the issue. How the compensation and rewards are structured is the issue.

So...we need to manage that better?

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

#308

Post by trasz » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

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…

It's not about Western civilisation, it's about economic neoliberalism, replacing every existing metric with a single one: shareholders' profits. Those do-nothing administrators _do_ have a marketable skill: they make money for the company. Or at least appear to, according to (obviously flawed) criteria that are being used to evaluate ones' work.

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

#309

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

jerry1979 wrote: post #225

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

I don't even think Marx would agree with that. He thought capitalism produced a stage of history that wasn't exactly capitalist, which then would inevitably produce communism through socialism.

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

#310

Post by zeruch » Wed, Apr 27, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

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…

"is quite puzzling"

Is it?

The financialization of every aspect of life, in this case with for-profit hospitals through multiple layers of insurance middle-men, the exodus you describe would seem one of the natural byproducts from miles away.