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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

#431

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…

Do nurses have work unions? Would that solve the issue?

Yes. Massachusetts which is NOT a right-to-work state. That means the union can negotiate a clause in the contract that any nurses working at the hospital must join the union. Here is a current contract that includes pay ranges:

https://www.massnurses.org/public/resources/bargaining-unit/...

'Step' is years of experience

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

#432
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…

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 hav…

This isn't particularly reasonable analysis. A large chunk of the unvaccinated population is elderly and contraindicated for vaccination or in hospice care. From talking with nurses, the elderly population has its own set of problems and frustrations. Imagine trying to administer care to someone who has no idea why they're in a hospital setting. Similarly, vaccination status in American COVID-hospitalization research classifies people of unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated. These people are often homeless, isolated and elderly, or mentally unwell and unable to provide reliable information to caregivers. Again, likely unpleasant to work with.

Grouping these people as conspiratorial is unfair and seems politically motivated. While you definitely have some overlap with conspiratorial people, people have a right to be skeptical of medical care, which is often incorrect and potentially life threatening. Being able to explain things concisely and with evidence is a core skill for a nurse, much like being able to explain to someone why their technical decisions are setting them up for failure is a core skill for a software architect.

But from talking to nurses, this isn't the drive for negative workplace satisfaction. Patients who are hospitalized are less likely to be mentally stable: many pathways to hospitalization come from extremely poor decision making, and many of these people are repeatedly hospitalized. Combine this with the fact that it's a very physical job, primarily handled by women, and you have a multi-faceted problem that's not as easy to solve as just giving people right-think.

Personally I think the pathway to fixing this is appropriately valuing nursing care, what is often a highly-skilled profession with large physical, legal, and downstream risk, and compensating people appropriately. While nursing is a disproportionately paid job relative to educational requirements, current compensation really doesn't accurately account for just how demanding a job it is.

The amount of nurses you see who become addicted to painkillers, benzos, etc., is truly sad. Much like teaching, it's an area where I feel that society is inaccurately evaluating what the overall impact could be if the role functioned well.

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

#433
post #235

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…

We’re facing some massive generational crises at this point, and it feels like the only solution is to wait for the current leadership to die off, and hope the gen x’ers fix it. The WWII generation fixed the ozone hole, but their kids didn’t lift a finger for global warming. Subsequent generations are scrambling to pick up the pieces for our kids, while crap like this, and our rapidly collapsing democracy keep sabota…

While I think SOME longevity in congress/the senate is a good thing (You get more done). I really wish we had something like an age cap.

It's really crazy that the only way it seems like we can get these senators/congresspeople out of office is death from old age.

The fact is, your mind DOES deteriorate when you get older. That's why so many phone scams are special built to target older people.

A change I'd make to the constitution is that "nobody over the age of 70 can hold a governmental position".

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

#434
post #387

I'd like to know what "considering leaving" means in this study. I consider leaving my profession every time a React hook misbehaves and locks up my browser, but I'm not actually going to leave. 90% seems way too high to be people who are actively wanting to leave.

> 90% seems way too high to be people who are actively wanting to leave We are talking about the people who clean up the nastiest human waste that our bodies are capable of producing. I was already surprised that this number was ever less than 100% tbh

Well they knew that going in, so I'm not convinced that's a factor.

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

#435
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spoken with nurses who've had a variety of other jobs at other types of places. They are consistent in telling me that working as a nurse is a worse environment in the way they are treated. The example stories they have shared are the type of thing I can't relate to and I've worked in software, general engineering, food service, construction, and tech support (I answered calls for 3 years).

This is also my experience being married to a nurse. Any story I have about a boss, coworker, or client being a jerk, she has about five stories about someone being bad enough that I'd already be shooting resumes toward anyone who will take me. She's been punched in the face by a patient, she's had coworkers who sabotage each other due to personal vendettas, she's had bosses go on racist tirades in meetings, and on a…

Yes, my wife has also been punched working in the hospital. She now does nursing by phone where people are still really awful to her, but at least they can't assault her.

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

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol.. what kind of calculation is this? n is 1 in this case, the survey was not repeated 200 times from which you derived 90% as the mean number of nurses quitting.

It's a normal approximation of the expected variance (in terms of standard deviation) in the estimate of the mean of the sum of 200 Bernoulli random variables. Each nurses' response is considered an observation of a Bernoulli distributed random variable, and we trying to determine the rate of that variable. You are incorrect that "n is 1" since, by that logic one survey talking to 100,000 nurses would be the same as…

Thank you for taking the time to explain your modelling. Unfortunately I will need to read more on this topic, because I do not understand the intuition behind the priors "uniform prior of alpha_prior = 1, and beta_prior = 1".

The way I would generally approach such a problem is by running monte carlo simulations. Assuming the true rate of nurses quitting is X, what is the chance that a random sample of 200 nurses has the expectation of quitting >= 90%. To get the lower bound of the confidence interval, I will run this simulation for several values of X, starting at say X=60%, increasing until I get >95% chance that a random sample of 200 nurses has E(quitting) > 90%. Do you think this approach makes sense ?

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This one is big for product designers. You're right that there are definitely opportunities for improvement here. As a Product person that has worked in EMR/Healthcare IT systems, I can tell you the biggest challenge is most of the decisions are driven by legally-required compliance. In many cases, you literally cannot make it better because the brokenness is /by design/ to comply with the law. Nearly across the bo…

HITRUST certification is the most demoralizing thing I've done in my life. You need a policy, a procedure and evidence of things like this: Shared system resources (e.g., registers, main memory, secondary storage) are released back to the system, protected from disclosure to other systems/applications/users, and users cannot intentionally or unintentionally access information remnants.

Yep, try doing that in an electron context and you quickly learn why a lot of this software still runs on mainframes with UX from the 80s, hard T1 lines (if they’re lucky enough to be off ISDNs), faxing things all around since that’s considered “secure”, etc etc. A lot of startups can’t touch this stuff due to regulatory hurdles. When the first step is “go change the law”, it’s a non-starter.

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

#438
post #387

I'd like to know what "considering leaving" means in this study. I consider leaving my profession every time a React hook misbehaves and locks up my browser, but I'm not actually going to leave. 90% seems way too high to be people who are actively wanting to leave.

> 90% seems way too high to be people who are actively wanting to leave We are talking about the people who clean up the nastiest human waste that our bodies are capable of producing. I was already surprised that this number was ever less than 100% tbh

Yes, but that is what they signed up for - i.e. they knew it going in, and that has not all of a sudden changed.

I couldn't do it, and god bless them, but that is unlikely a cause of people leaving the profession - that would be like a computer programmer saying they were leaving the profession because they suddenly found out they have to stare at a screen most of the day.

I also find that '90%' number suspect as someone that works very closely with the healthcare community - there is a lot of turnover, and its hard to hire nurses right now - but almost always when someone leaves their job it is because they went down the street and got a 25% raise, i.e. they didn't leave their profession, just their job.

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

#440

These "nursing crisis" articles are a semi-annual feature, likely a PR stunt by the hospitals for more subsidies and guest nurses. The nursing crisis is 57 years old now: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14252064/ (1965) Similar articles WHY THE NURSING SHORTAGE PERSISTS. HALE T. N Engl J Med. 1964 May 21;270:1092-7. doi: 10.1056/NEJM196405212702105. PMID: 14121489 No abstract available. STUDENTS' DISAPPOINTMENTS IN P…

A good path to explore, but requires more data points than two from 60 years ago... Let's try this approach: [0] steady with huge uptick since the pandemic [1] steady decline with uptick in July 2021 [2] sparse, but slow incline since July 2021 [3] shallow dip ~2013, slow include since

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=n... [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=n... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=n... [3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=n...

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