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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

#571

Post by kickout »

inetknght wrote: post #382
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow the history of HR departments in a lot of modern corporations you often see them operating as private in-house legal firms, and aggressively expanding their purview to include even actions at the executive level. The only thing most HR departments look out for is HR. Everything they do resolves around continuing or expanding the power of the HR department. Your comment on lack of leadership is spot on.…

> No one wants to be accountable. That is American corporations in a nutshell. Outsource everything, put layers upon layers, and insulate yourself. Then when fecal matter hits the rotary you can put the blame on others and, at worst, you get fired and there's little to no worry about any sort of legal reprecussion because... well you weren't accountable for the problems in the first place! It's a massive problem crea…

Agree with you, but people on HN and other places tend to flame/heckle companies that don't do this too, aka Elon Musk. Love him or hate him he does things 'his' way without all the seemingly built-in middle layers. I like it as opposed to the HR led office space cosplay, but people seem to want their cake and eat it too.

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

#573

Post by pbuzbee »

Is this a shock?

- Demanding work: 12 hour shifts, irregular schedules, night shifts, physically exhausting, limited breaks (including bathroom/water!)

- High responsibility with unsafe conditions. You're literally responsible for people's lives. Poor staffing ratios stretch you thin and make you more likely to make mistakes. And if you make a mistake, you're at huge risk for litigation... and now criminal consequences too. Responsibilities, resources, and staffing stretched even thinner due to the pandemic.

- Administration that treats you as something to be optimized and does the absolute bare minimum to support you. Instead they tack on additional tasks, expectations, and requirements ("no water at a nurse's station!"). They encourage a culture where nurses provide a concierge service to 'guests' instead of critical care to patients.

- Hostile/entitled patients. I'd guess many/most patients are not an issue, but it only takes a couple of difficult/combative patients to really ruin your conditions.

- Low pay given the responsibility and working conditions for non-travel nurses. https://nurseslabs.com/nurse-salary/#nurse_salaries_by_state Like many others pointed out here, in tech I make way more than a nurse for a job that's less demanding, has far lower stakes, and is of far less value to society.

To me the blame lies mainly in middle/upper management, whose role is to build and empower an effective workforce. If 90% of your workers are considering leaving, you blew it.

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

#574

Post by ikiris »

michael1999 wrote: post #539
sfteus wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Married to an RN and absolutely sympathetic to the staffing/pay plight they're currently facing. I'm unfortunately not very familiar with the case of Michelle Heughins, but I've heard a lot of the RaDonda Vaught case. The high points of the case as I understand them: * Vaught stated her department was not understaffed, nor was she tired. The incident also occurred in 2017, so pre-pandemic * Vaught went to dispense Ve…

There's a big difference from revoking her license, and locking her in a cage for 3 years.

Yeah usually that difference is causing someone to die by being criminally negligent. Which she was.

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

#575

Post by gruez »

Wistar wrote: post #418
elhudy wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that nurses can now legally be thrown under the bus with criminal charges for malpractice while hospitals walk away scotch-free [1]. This is huge in the nursing community right now. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/24/1088397...

And, alas, found guilty: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...

Discussed on HN with counter-argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778376

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

#576

Post by ikiris »

js2 wrote: post #515
Shuang1 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That case goes far beyond med error and I don't understand why people keep bringing it up as an example. She pulled the wrong med, and then injected it and walked out of the room rather than observing for effects. Also the med she pulled had warnings on all sides of the bottle and on the top saying very clearly that it's fatal to administer without ventilation. This went beyond a mistake to negligence.

Janie Harvey Garner, a St. Louis registered nurse: “In response to a story like this one, there are two kinds of nurses,” Garner said. “You have the nurses who assume they would never make a mistake like that, and usually it’s because they don’t realize they could. And the second kind are the ones who know this could happen, any day, no matter how careful they are. This could be me. I could be RaDonda.” https://khn.o…

If nurses quit over criminal liability for killing someone by being that careless, everyone is better off by them not being in the field. Pharmacy has had the same rules for over a hundred years. A great example is even in the movie a wonderful life.

edit: minor grammar fix

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

#577

Post by ayngg »

cogman10 wrote: post #416
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…

The one I think you are missing is that nurses are and have been overworked for a WHILE now. (that's what I get from /r/nursing) Hospitals have made sure they hire JUST ENOUGH nurses to cover shifts and no more. With covid hitting, this blew out the number of nurses needed resulting in a lot of "I know you've already worked 60 hours, but can you do another 20? we are short!". Rather than hiring permanent people or up…

I actually think that this is just one example of many across a ton of disciplines where people like Nurses basically are forced to deal with costs and responsibilities offloaded onto them from above the responsibility chain. Resources are eaten up at the top of the chain to their benefit and costs are offloaded down the chain until it reaches people like Nurses at the end of the line who have to deal with it because there is nobody else to offload it to. There is no shortage of people wanting to be nurses (in some places it is extremely competitive), and there is a huge demand for nurses based on shortages everywhere, but somehow we are in a situation where nurses are overworked because they are short staffed.

I look at academia which is rife with money sloshing around, and see undergraduate classes are taught by grad students who make ~30k a year who are basically the Nurses of the academic world and treated like garbage. The justice system is dysfunctional, courts systems are overwhelmed and understaffed so criminals just enter and exit like a revolving door, and police is basically useless because the best they can do is taxi criminals into the system that automatically spits them out again, while they take the brunt of public criticism for how they are forced to deal with a problem that is mostly beyond their scope.

In all of these cases it seems like the bottom if falling out of these institutions, and the responsibilities have fallen on their respective janitors to deal with it when the solutions need to come from places that have been incentivized to create the mess in the first place.

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

#578

Post by lbebber »

cupofpython wrote: post #422
vlunkr wrote: 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

A friend of mine was (is?) completely unfazed by this sort of thing--right from the start, it was not some resistance built up over time.

She left the profession due to the long hours, low pay, and poor treatment.

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

#579

Post by Bilal_io »

germinalphrase wrote: post #55

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…

So, a hospital can close a service with no repercussions, and if workers at a "critical" secure decide to strike they'd be ordered by a judge to get back to work...

I hate every part of it.

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

#580

Post by tinco »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #558
cogman10 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one I think you are missing is that nurses are and have been overworked for a WHILE now. (that's what I get from /r/nursing) Hospitals have made sure they hire JUST ENOUGH nurses to cover shifts and no more. With covid hitting, this blew out the number of nurses needed resulting in a lot of "I know you've already worked 60 hours, but can you do another 20? we are short!". Rather than hiring permanent people or up…

> Hospitals have made sure they hire JUST ENOUGH nurses to cover shifts and no more. This is a two-edged sword. If you hire more than you need, the nurses' hours will be cut during normal situations and they won't make enough money. If hospitals don't cut extra hours and instead keep the staff on the clock, a public scandal will erupt surrounding well-paid medical professionals sitting around doing nothing.

> a public scandal will erupt surrounding well-paid medical professionals sitting around doing nothing

I don't think that's true. Increasing the amount of nurses means simply increasing the amount of care. If you have twice as many nurses, you'll have twice as much care for your patients. No way nurses would be sitting around doing nothing.

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