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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

#971
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to hear the truth. There’s near-infinite demand for healthcare and a constrained (mostly artificially) supply. Insurance, people and government can’t solve the problem of the supply and demand by throwing money on it. You either expand supply or remove demand. Given removing demand is... not desirable. The only alternative to fix the issue is remove regulation and expand supply. That’s it. Insurance make…

You should educate yourself about how most of the western world manages to have a functioning semi social health care system. US is broken because of this blind fantaic faith in free markets deregulation simplifications. The problem is a large swath of the population that believe in all earnestly that squeezing profit is some magical tool for a functioning economy. Too bad US is so good at PR, this mind virus is wrea…

> US is broken because of this blind fantaic faith in free markets deregulation simplifications.

The US is broken because we somehow believe that a highly regulated market is "free" as long as the government isn't paying for it. We literally have the worst of both worlds.

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

#972
post #54

I work in tech with no college degree and about 9 years of programming experience. I make mid 100,000's per year. My S/O has 6 years of Emergency Department experience and a bachelors degree and she made about 65k at our local hospital. I think pay is an enormous factor in this. Her local hospital has nurses with less than 1 year of experience being preceptors to new grads.

How long did it take you to break 100k? Be sure to include those pre-employed years when you didn't even know what 'if' statement meant. A nurse can hit that in 6 years easy through BSN+NP, and that's starting at literally NOTHING. (Alternatively there's a like path for PAs to practice in a mid-level practitioner role that is comparable to NP in those same 6 years)

> A nurse can hit that in 6 years easy through BSN+NP, and that's starting at literally NOTHING.

That NP is the key. Just a BSN will earn you under six figures in most of the USA. We get job mailers because my partner is licensed but non-practicing. And these are advertising nursing positions for $35-40/hr.

According to the BLS, an RN earns an median of $78k a year. $100k/yr is the top 15%.

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

#973
post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these conditions have always existed. But I can't imagine 90% have wanted to quit in the last decade. The most important factor thus is most likely COVID

Like with many jobs Covid revealed what society truly values and what not. Sure clapping for nurses, nice. But these people should have propper working conditions and wages, otherwise nobody will want to do the job. Covid just gave the realization that even if we face a global crisis where nurses are dying on the front, the rest of society is not willing to provide the bare minimum these people deserve.

Exactly this. The nursing profession has been accumulating empathetic debt for probably decades. By empathetic debt I mean nurses taking on more work and responsibility beyond personal rational choice because if they fall short then patients suffer.

the truly tragic part of all of this is that as much as we would like to imagine these nurses confidently walking away from a bad situation like some sort of power move.. a lot of them are not. A lot are finally leaving because they are broken and feel broken enough that they dont feel capable of being responsible for patients anymore.

To reiterate- many (most?) nurses that quit still want to help people, but no longer feel capable of helping. That is a level of trauma that can be passed down to the next generation. It might take effort to let the gravity of this reality sink in.

Anecdotally, my mom is a nurse and she has come home and cried due to sheer helplessness to her work problems on more than one occasion. Shes near retirement age and switched careers into this late in life to help people so this is pretty much it for her. If the system does not show mercy and continues to grind her out then she leaves the workforce feeling helpless and broken.

It goes beyond payment. better pay will go a LONG way, and is absolutely necessary.. but it is not enough. There needs to be more redundancy, because 100% utilization of that kind of resource in that kind of system is something that would get you a failing grade in system design.

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

#975
post #939

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have no choice but to drop salaries or close up shop there's bound to be at least a third option and the fact that you ignored it is part of the problem.

There are no other source of income other than insurance plans, so if they decrease rates we have no choice but to decrease pay. Im not sure where you are getting the ‘you ignored it’ comment, when the new rates were announced we adjusted pay according to the decrease in rates.

Concierge care/Direct primary care or start your own surgical center that takes cash. My company contracts directly with fixed price surgical centers for elective care and bypasses insurance completely.

Insurance is a scam on patients and providers.

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

#976

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much more do nurses need? What you need to realize is that nursing salaries in the US are NOT uniform. From what I've seen in past discussions about it is they range anywhere from $20/hr -> $100k/year. The $100k/year are usually achieved only in cities and generally only by travel nurses. The majority of nurses, that I've seen, are clocking in at 50->60k yearly salary. Sort of like saying "Oh, that google dev m…

> Sort of like saying "Oh, that google dev makes $300k a year. How much more do devs in the US need?" And the answer to that is "how much is Google worth?" If your business relies on the efforts of software engineers to design and build your primary products, they should have the primary equity in the company. So no, even Google developers aren't paid nearly enough...and they're certainly overworked, regardless of ho…

> relies on the efforts of software engineers to design and build your primary products, they should have the primary equity in the company.

The average tenure at Google is 4 years. This means that most current Google's have joined when the company was already at sky high valuation. They made incremental improvements to the product line. But arguing that they should own the majority of the shares is just ridiculous. Think about it: if google had made no new development in the last 4 years, how much would it still be worth ? The answer is: not as much as today, but probably quite a lot.

Current employees thus deserve a part of the pie, as they are the one tending for it. But when they joined the pie was already very nice, and they had 0 impact on that. Not with their work nor their investment, so they can't claim that part for themselves.

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

#977
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...

> Don't forget that nurses can now legally be thrown under the bus with criminal charges for malpractice while hospitals walk away scotch-free The nurse in that case was prosecuted for criminal reckless homicide (not malpractice, which is civil negligence.) The characterization of the hospitals direct responsibility is negligence not arising to criminal (gross) negligence (as the principal of respondeat superior does…

You aren't wrong but you also aren't giving my comment the benefit of the doubt. I'm not a lawyer. When I say "malpractice" I'm not referring to the legal definition of the word, but the layman's term, defined as, "improper, illegal, or negligent professional activity or treatment, especially by a medical practitioner", which fits here well.

>This... isn't a new thing that deserves the “now” label like it is a change. Criminal wrongdoing by employees (including in healthcare) very often does not rise to a level of criminality for the employer, and that's been true for a long time.

Of course criminal charges for a patient death cannot be administered on an entity like an entire hospital, I didn't mean to insinuate that. But those who share responsibility for her actions: the administrators, doctors, morticians, everyone involved in designing the processes which led to this disaster and being involved in covering it up (i.e. the "hospital"), all seem at least partially liable if we are looking at this mistake through a criminal lens. Would you agree?

Some studies say that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US [1] - yet how often do we see "criminal reckless homicide" brought against nurses? There was an incredibly disingenuous serious of mistakes that had to happen for this nurse to mess up so badly, don't get me wrong. But when nurses are working 50-70 hours a week doing 14 hour shifts under extremely high pressure from management, these insane strings of mistakes are simply going to be an occurrence, and we shouldn't be using our tax dollars to pay for shitty lawyers to go after them for these mistakes. It's a waste of everybody's time, energy, and money, is detrimental to patients, and is a contributor to the fact that 90% of nurses are considering leaving the profession.

[1]https://news.yale.edu/2020/01/28/estimates-preventable-hospi...

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

#978
post #22

Poor pay, shift work, bad working conditions and multiple chances of catching all kinds of diseases. Most nurses I know have above average intelligence with an excellent work ethic. Just one bootcamp away from a much better life. So much sacrifice for the greater good, we the public are not worth it. Another profession I always think of are math teachers, they are good people.

A bootcamp doesn't guarantee anything; without the right aptitude and temperament the tech industry is just as miserable, with a side of failure if you can't keep your jobs. And no, "excellent work ethic" isn't enough.

Of course a bootcamp does not guarantee anything and I’m sure the bulk running are probably trash. But I’ve met a few good engineers that originally were in other industry (HR, law, teaching, fishing) and they actually learnt the bulk of their software knowledge via bootcamps, so it can work. A good mentor is probably worth more in the long run but they are rare and not available to buy.

While some parts of the tech industry are miserable, on average they are definitely overpaid as compared to nurses or even doctors in some countries. And there are plenty of non miserable places in tech, especially if you relocate. Some Europe software shops seem out of this world when compared to US gaming companies, some of which sound like sweat shops.

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

#979
post #921
post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wanted to understand how hospitals get away with treating their employees like that. In any other industry, people would not accept it. This is the industry where (arguably) I'd want people to be _most_ relaxed and _least_ overworked because human lives and wellbeing is on the line. Why don't airlines do that to their pilots? Should there be similar regulation in nursing?

Same reason game developers get treated like shit compared to many other developers. People are willing to put up with more shit to do a job they find rewarding.

So you are saying it's stockholm syndrome?

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

#980

I am a systems engineer and software developer, and I have worked on multiple healthcare related systems including one for a major hospital system. I wish I had more access to nurses during the process. I was always told they were too busy. I just wanted to observe, as I do with any client I write systems for, and was denied. I can say that at least 2 other groups were working on the exact same project as I in the ho…

I'd say it's highly questionable that this can be achieved in a reasonable timeframe, if at all. And millions suffer from easily solvable software problems (no communication, no testing and ground research, greed, bad ux), while you chase some current CS buzzword of the year that would win the assignment (AI, blockchain now, chatbots, VR before).

I think we agree? If you're saying that software should be more "easy to use tool" or "craftsman tool" and less "use latest flashy tech concept to replace people", then yes.
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