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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

#841
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…

I don't disagree nurses DESERVE to be paid more (I'm not sure if the economics bear out but they're certainly as WORTHY as many other professions), but wouldn't the fact that these nurses continue to work in nursing despite considering leaving bolster the argument even further that they are receiving adequate compensation? Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at l…

Well it depends what you think the purpose of economies is. One idea is that human beings are just a type of animal, and the economy is a social system which is supposed to incentivize the kind of behaviours that you want humans to do. If you want humans to be nurses, then the economy had better reward that.

Another interpretation is that the economy is a tool for exploiting people. For example, human beings are inherently of the opinion that human decency is good, they want to be functioning members of society, they care about the wellbeing of others, and if they are paid crap and treated like garbage, they will endure that, even to the point of great personal cost, emotional distress, mental illness, alcoholism, and even death. But as long as they don't quit, then everything is fine.

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

#842
About 7 years ago I switched to nursing from nearly 35 years as a software engineer. Each 13-hour shift my 6 or 7 patients, if there was a moment to talk, would ask why I did so. I'd make pretty much the same joke every time: "I was looking a job that was much much harder and paid much much less, so I landed on nursing. Unlike in a hospital, when I was in software and there was a crisis, we'd schedule a meeting and order burritos." The jokes stopped being funny, so three weeks ago I quit my last hospital nursing job.

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

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Invisible Hand works generally fine-ish for non-essential and commodity goods. People might be sad their favorite store went away, but, for the most part, life goes on. It seems to even be the least bad way to handle these sorts of things. It's a bit harder for me to see this as an acceptable approach to health care. Not every segment of the economy needs to be a constant drunkard's walk in search of maximum prof…

Will people pay more for stability and reliability? If so, then that is what businesses will optimize for. Businesses exist to give us what we want. Those that do it well are profitable, those that don’t aren’t. Keep in mind that the effort spent to make healthcare more stable could have instead been used to provide more healthcare overall. Or something else entirely, like shoes or haircuts. All services are not as g…

I think you are implying that most people are 'happy enough' with the current businesses they interact with.

Most people realize that a business will only change if a significant portion of buyers change their spending habits, and individually choosing to not support a business out of ethical concerns only hurts themselves.

Then there ends up being a lot of people who buy products from businesses they hate, and would support collective action against those businesses, like passing laws.

People like that aren't dumb, they are just trying to work around how their next best option is so much worse than buying the original product.

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

#845
post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is not a blank check. It's a standard check (see sibling comment on fee schedules), and each check tends to actually be quite low of an amount. The magnitude of "standard" and "low" are both demonstrated by the fact that when private insurers negotiate pricing contracts (basically, a one-off fee schedule) with hospital groups, they express prices in terms of "medicare multiples". For example, the insurer wil…

Is anyone actually making money as a Medicare provider? I thought the private carriers were heavily subsidizing it?

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

#847
post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree nurses DESERVE to be paid more (I'm not sure if the economics bear out but they're certainly as WORTHY as many other professions), but wouldn't the fact that these nurses continue to work in nursing despite considering leaving bolster the argument even further that they are receiving adequate compensation? Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at l…

Are you familiar with the US? I don't see how you can in good faith argue that if people don't like what they have to do and/or what they get paid for it, they can just go do something else.

There's also the consideration that nurses don't leave, because they can see that patient care standards are not good, and they worry that if they leave, their colleagues will be forced take up the slack, employers won't replace them (since the colleagues took up the slack), and they will reward themselves for having found a way to "improve efficiency."

There are, of course, onlookers who are unable to even perceive the moral dimensions that normal human beings take for granted. Perhaps they were beamed down from the mothership just yesterday? The prevalence of psychopathy among human beings cannot be as high as it would appear from the average internet message-board, can it?

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

#848
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…

> 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. why is this such a common story across pretty much every single industry? There's more people in the country than 10, 20, 30 years ago. More customers, more…

Because it's more profitable to have a single person that works 80 hours and one desperate for a job than 2 that work 40 hours.

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

#849
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…

> IT systems that they have to use were designed by people who have not talked with the workers who use them.

I worked at a large emr company and the developers had access to nurses and were required to support go lives a few times a year to support nurses on the floor.

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

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. why is this such a common story across pretty much every single industry? There's more people in the country than 10, 20, 30 years ago. More customers, more…

Because they really can in many cases from more automation, better tools, and better processes and understanding. The demand also doesn't neccessarily increase linearly with the population.

in many cases there is room for automation. I'm not quite confident we are at the level of an Auto-Doc assisting/replacing nurses yet, though. Nurses being thrown into multiple duties for 1.5x standard full time work seems to suggest that one or all of the above factors are not being met.

>The demand also doesn't neccessarily increase linearly with the population.

for elastic goods, no. But medicine is about as inelastic a product as you can get.

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