Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

healthcareitnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 1001 posts

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

#741

Post by throwawaygh »

Aperocky wrote: post #674
throwawaygh wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> they can 10x their profits by only serving elderly clients. > Soon people stopped coming Ah, yes. Why didn't we think of this before? By increasing the cost of (geriatric) healthcare, we can destroy demand. That's how supply/demand curves work right? In this way the invisible hand delivers unto us a fountain of youth ;)

They may 10x their profit by serving elderly clients but that is assuming x more elderly clients would want to suddenly come. But why? Are elderly clients underserved in that area? Are they going to ditch their original care provider and all come here?

> But why?

Old people in the USA are EXTREMELY wealthy in terms of healthcare purchasing power. All retired people have medicare. Many retired people have additional healthcare coverage from their former employers (doesn't exist anymore -- disappeared along with pensions -- but this benefit used to be common). Many retired people have significant savings in addition to medicare and private health insurance.

Most new parents have little to no government assistance, do not have significant expendable income, and have little to no accumulated wealth. Children, of course, are even poorer than their deadbeat parents.

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

#742

Post by munk-a »

WalterBright wrote: post #651
ayngg wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And yet the government budgets rise dramatically year after year.

The government is one of the few places where you can get a job in your twenties and retire comfortably in your 60s having made a decent, but certainly not outstanding, amount of money with consistent raises and cost of living adjustments.

What some people will call government waste - other people will call ethical employee treatment... sure there are a lot of other sources of inefficiency outside of your comment - but complaining about overpaid government bureaucrats is essentially advocating for the same race-to-the-bottom that has stagnated wages in large parts of the labour pool.

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

#743

Post by ugh123 »

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…

Capitalism and health care just don't mix

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

#744

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

marcusverus wrote: post #477
cowpig wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as a "free market" for healthcare. The ability for consumers to exit a market is one of the prerequisites for the invisible hand effect. You can't exit the healthcare market.

You can't exit the food market, either, and yet there is clearly a thriving free market for food. How does your theory account for this?

This is a bad faith question asked without any basic thought.

Within 5 miles, I have at least 10 different grocery stores to shop at. Each will carry hundreds of products at less than $10 each. Not only do I have tons of choices, but the pricing is completely transparent. And that's just grocery stores. Add restaurants (Both sit-down restaurants and fast food), and that number quickly reaches over 100 within a 5-mile radius.

If I'm in a medical emergency and someone dials 911, I'm likely just being brought to the nearest hospital. I have zero choice in the matter, and will come out with whatever bill they want to charge me.

Even in non-emergencies, good luck shopping on price. Doctor offices don't like giving that out.

There's competition in the food market, but not healthcare.

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

#745

Post by notch656a »

landemva wrote: post #623
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ended up being the last straw for one of my friends who was a nurse. He kept getting vacation requests denied due to lack of staffing, yet if he asked if they were looking to hire, the answer was always No. He was super lucky and had some early cryptocurrency investments pay off big, so he decided he was done with it retired. He said that he loved helping people as a nurse, but not at the cost of his own physica…

That describes me, though in tech. Trying to step back in to tech and recently had interview. After I explained parenting time schedule, HR guy said everbody works 60 hour weeks every week so there is not a role for me.

That sounds perfectly fair actually. You explained you can't work 60 hours a week and he explained it's not the role for you. Complete honesty and the choice was made not to do the deal. You shouldn't get special hours or treatment for being a parent.

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

#746

Post by linsomniac »

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…

In cases I'm familiar with, they aren't hiring JUST ENOUGH nurses, they are hiring AS FEW NURSES as they can get away with. More like half as many as they should. IIRC, nurse-to-patient ratio should be around 1:5, but it can often be more like 1:10 or worse.

On top of that, they also hire as few orderlies and nursing assistants as possible, so the nurse doesn't even have anyone to offload things to, and ends up having to do more work on more patients.

This has been a problem well before the pandemic.

It's a trope among nurses that they are so busy they don't have time to use the bathroom, let alone eat lunch.

Source: My wife is a nurse, most of her friends are nurses, and she left the profession ~a year before the pandemic because of exactly these issues.

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

#747

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ren_engineer wrote: post #343
dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

capitalism is the reason for hospitals choosing to serve patients covered by Medicare which will give them a blank check with tax payer money?

> Medicare which will give them a blank check with tax payer money?

Whoever implanted this idea into your head was lying to you and you should probably question the other claims that person or organization has said.

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

#748

Post by kenjackson »

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 you don't go to jail for this, do you do so for any sort of negligence? What about an Uber driver that runs a red light and kills a pedistrian walking? Or is drunk and kills someone? That worries me a lot more than this story.

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

#749

Post by screye »

kerbs wrote: post #601
screye wrote: post #550

Not to be mean, but 'leave nursing' and then what ? Nursing is a well paying middle-class job without a lot of transferable skills to other professions. Don't say programming. It isn't the solution to everything. Other low-entry-barrier jobs pay much less and have exploitation problems of their own. For a lot of middle class families, dual income is essential to maintain their lifestyle. So SAHM is not an option. Nur…

> 'leave nursing' and then what When we got married, my wife (Physicians Assistant) made handily more than I did. $140k to my $82k midwest, software development job. 10 years later, she makes $130k (after cutting hours back) and I make $4-500k as a software engineer in the midwest. The two markets crossed drastically Where are they going? For us, home.

> I make $4-500k as a software engineer in the midwest

This is a massive outlier though. In your case, the exception proves the rule.

The rule: "The 1% of Nurses that found a partner in the US top 1 percentile will be able to quit their job."

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

#750

Post by munk-a »

runnerup wrote: post #632
ARandomerDude wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can pay people fixed monthly salary + overtime hours. You don’t need to cut their hours and their pay, though that’s often the choice that employers make.

Exactly, choosing to cut hours or pay due to a lull in business is a choice made by the employer. It's not like these hospitals are sputtering along right at the fringe of solvency and one bad choice will bankrupt them - private health providers tend to make pretty comfortable profit margins and the fact that they can pay such outrageous surge prices for travel nurses is a pretty clear proof of how much they have to spare.
Post reply on HN