41–50 of 1001 posts
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.
A family friend was talking to a doctor who was considering quitting. The reason why, at least for that doctor, wasn't really the stress from patients. It was all the damned paperwork and the stress that created.
FHIR would be a good idea, but in practice its hard to correlate a patient across the systems. Few hospitals and doctors setup a push notification for when they change a patient's record.
Essentially all of the software needs to be redone with a focus on a centralized record tracking system. The rewrite needs practitioners (all of them, not just Docs, but the lowly CNA too) to drive the requirements. Admins should be included, but not the target of day to day UI.
The market will surely adjust, by killing off people who can no longer afford nursing.
U.S. nursing salaries relative to average U.S. wages are above the OECD average: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2017-58-en... So pay isn't the problem. The U.S. is also above the OECD average for the number of nurses per 1000 population: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334515420/figure/fi... So staffing isn't the problem either. The U.S. is below the OECD average for the number of doctors…
Also, it looks like the outrageous costs of healthcare in the US don't correlate at all with nurses' wages. If I were a nurse, I would feel demoralised if I was doing a lot of the hard work, yet administrators and middlemen still get the most money.
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 trying to stop nurses from talking about pay.
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.
3. IT systems that they have to use were designed by people who have not talked with the workers who use them. They may have been designed with laws and compliance in mind. Nurses aren't the people who choose or pay for these systems. But, they use them a lot (maybe the most) and it's obvious they weren't taken into account when designing the UX. It's maddening for them.
This one is big for product designers. Often we listen to the people who pay for it and miss out on the people who actually have to use it.
4. Nurses are the catch all for jobs. Not enough aides? Nurses do the work. Food service workers don't want to take food into a patients room... nurses will do it. Not only do they have higher ratios of patients but they fill in the work when other areas have shortages, too. So, the work per patient goes up. Pay doesn't go up, though.
Time to bring Robots faster.
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.
I was under the impression that nurses were paid pretty well (generally speaking).
Looking at my area (NYC), I'd have to take over a 50% pay cut from my engineering job to be "paid well" as a nurse. And I suspect my job is a lot less stressful.
A family friend was talking to a doctor who was considering quitting. The reason why, at least for that doctor, wasn't really the stress from patients. It was all the damned paperwork and the stress that created.
My primary care doctor dropped me a few years back. He said his solo practice couldn't handle the paperwork of having so many patients so he went to just seeing patients for his specialty. He was admittedly older and had never particularly embraced computers and so forth. (And then my new PCP retired during the pandemic.)
For people with chronic conditions a PCP makes sense, for the rest of us it is just another pointless loop you have to jump through.
Time to bring Robots faster.