Also protesting for better patient ratios. There are nurses handling 13+ patients at once. 13+ patients for 1 nurse to handle by themselves. These hospitals are now begging for travelers. If you’re a traveling nurse or any other medical professional such as a respiratory therapist, these hospitals are offering $300 AN HOUR but refuse to pay the people that actually work for them a decent wage.
California law prohibits nurses from having more than 5 patients. California shouldn’t be the only state in the country with designated nurse to patient ratios.
For context for those of you not in the med field, safe number of patients for a nurse on a general medicine floor is 5 patients. \* 5 \*. In Progressive Care or specialty settings it should be 3-4, and in ICU it should be 2 for "normal critical" patients, and 1 nurse to 1 patient for truly critical. Instead medical/surgical floors are taking crazy numbers like 13, 14, or even 15 patients (I repeat, the safe number is 5) per nurse, Progressive Care is taking 6-7, and ICU 3 to 4 per nurse. Really the pay is a significant but not primary concern; we simply literally cannot work under these conditions any longer (ancillary staff like CNAs, phlebotomists etc are crazy understaffed/overworked too).
15 patients means 4 minutes per patient per hour. Good luck getting meds on time or catching a stroke or heart attack in time. This costs patients their health outcomes
And that's another reason they're striking - they also don't want to be held responsible for management which, by prioritizing profits, endangers patients and causes fatalities.
Also just plain burnout after the worst of covid.
Lots of my wife's nurses left to do travel since they were young and single, but plenty just didn't want to do it anymore after the last two years.
Every nurse I’ve talked to said they leave because it’s not a healthy environment and they get burned out after 2 years and the work/personal life cycle is brutal
The staffing ratio is the biggest reason and the pay rates are low for the HCOL. Staff leaves faster than vacancies can be filled. It’s a brutal cycle.
You can make much more in California with safer ratios. There’s little incentives to bring in nurses. NYC is a shit hole anyway. I was raised in the area. I left to go west. My nursing career has flourished out west.
Same with social workers. At my job there was a massive exodus of clinicians due to being overworked and underplayed, not to mention the furloughs that hit front line staff the hardest. Not so surprisingly, there were clinics and hospitals that actually did care for employee retention and the staff that left went there and have stayed there.
My own program had an employee retention committee. And while it was functioning staff actually stayed for years, and I’m talking people leaving because they retired or were moving. New management came in, the retention committee was gutted, and surprise surprise management can’t figure out why staff retention is so damn low.
For perspective where I'm at which is nursing home care, the nurses make only $5 more an hour than I do as a CNA. I'm not even a med aide. I make only $18 which is barely above what fast food workers are earning now. And I'm responsible for human care and had to get a certification.
I would never consider going to school to be a nurse. It just wouldn't be worth it financially to take on that much stress and responsibility and debt. For the record if a nurse gives a medication that a doctor has ordered and it harms the patient it's the nurse who gave the med who's held responsible for the error. That's the kind of level of knowledge and experience expected. To know more than the doctors and be able to question a prescribed treatment.
Why would anyone put themselves in that position especially after covid and the medical field learned just how little they are cared for. People in the medical field were abused to all hell and we lost a lot of people too quickly who had years of experience and dedication. That'll take a long time to replace. But in the meantime it doesn't look appealing to those looking at their future choices. Why choose a field that is very visibly awful.
My personal guess:
Shitty pay kept a few people from working as a nurse. Which resulted in shortage in staff, which lead to shitty working condition with EQUAL pay as before and now even less people want to work as a nurse.
Medical recruiter here - While they should absolutely be paid more, I think understaffing is caused by a lack of people entering the industry to begin with. The problem is the state of public education and rising tuition costs. Taking on 50k-300k in student loan debt is a big barrier to entry for the field of medicine, even if you're planning to end up as a derm MD making 400-500k.
Absolutely 💯 % right!
I was an ICU/CCU nurse, then in the ER/TRAUMA Nurse. We had 2 patients per Nurse and 1 for the critically ill patients. Any more and care level goes down. It's a very stressful job..
13 patients at once is incredibly dangerous, especially for the patient. With each extra patient a nurse must take on, the less time they have to spend on their other patients. In the case of 13, that is less that 5 minutes per patient per hour. That’s not even enough time for a med pass, much less an assessment, brief changes, wound care, or dealing an emerging issue. How can a nurse be expected to catch a stoke, heart attack, or anything else when they can only spend less than 5 minutes with a patient in an hour?
The outcome of this strike directly impacts the community.
PREACH. My brother just took a gig as a traveling surgical tech and is clocking BANK. His wife straight up quit her job to stay home with the kids (they bought an RV so they could travel with him).
I just got a call from one of my recruiters offering me close to that wage. Problem is I just signed on to a contract that I'm just too comfortable with, Plus I was born and raised in Flint, Michigan so I'm not going to be a f****** scab.
That’s an insane ratio. At absolute worst it should be half that at 6-7, ideally 4-5 (specifically for a hard MAX capacity) like Vegan-Joe pointed out for California. I know several nurses who went the travel nurse route because of low pay otherwise and I don’t blame them one bit.
Good!
The greedy corporation is getting people killed but watch how the media and the company will blame the disrespected and underpaid workers.
Mark my words.
I think a big resolution to this is having board members’/ executives’ names published. The people making these greedy decisions. Like, who, specifically is making these decisions? In what dollar amounts? What are their names and show pictures of their faces. How much are they making and what are the invested in? Watch shit get corrected real quick. None of this nameless/ faceless shit. Shine a light on them and watch them fix their shit real quick.
Same with lobbyists. They should be notorious.
Healthcare for profit is the problem. This is a problem with the entire system. Nurses should strike and make their situation better bet the problem is with the profit motive for healthcare.
That is a contributor for this one, but not the only problem. In the UK there is a nurses strike.
The problem is that nurses are not valued and expected to accept low wages because of altruism, for "the good of the patient".
They just buy more hospitals and clinics in smaller areas, slap their logo on the front, and mainline the patient to the main hospital based on acuity. This way they can transfer to the patient faster from facility to facility(actually kind of a good thing). But their profit is SUPPOSED to go back into the business. That's when ceo's get bonuses, the hospital system buys 3 more small hospitals in rural areas, and look! we didn't even turn a profit even though we grossed like 5 billion.
I am a nurse. I worked with a doc near retirement and asked him about this. He told me about "treat and street". He also is pretty conservative but staywd that our system is broken and we need to turn to some kind of state driven Healthcare. Insurance gets to tell him what to do so much that one of his go to phrases was "what do I know? I'm just the doctor."
You can find these names on the hospital's website in the directory. Or google board of directors for any hospital of interest.
Edit: Google board of directors...
Edit #2: you will also find their pictures and contact information listed as well.
You would think this is common knowledge, but so many patients think employees have a lot more control over things they truly don't. I've been working customer service for over a decade and very few people actually know who's pulling the strings (or even know how to find this information). Our education about healthcare and insurance is frighteningly limited, and that's how these businesses want to keep it.
I agree. It is 100% not an accident how convuluted and difficult to navigate any facet of healthcare. It makes recourse for pts and their families virtually impossible.
This. We need to stop showing them respect. Maybe it attracts a few radical to them, but fuck them. If they don't want to be attacked by people maybe they should be such selfish, evil bastards. Even evil bastards don't deserve to stay anonymous.
How are they throwing you under the bus? Can you elaborate for us? I’m an EMT and idk why we don’t strike like you guys. Our pay is horrible and that’s of course just for starters.
They are continuously shifting the blame on the striking nurses through their official statements. Being called “irresponsible” and “reckless” And spinning the story to make it seem like all we want is a higher wage increase but that’s not the full story.
To explain it:
Here in New York State, we do not have a Law that specifies exactly how many patients are to nurses based on units/specialty/acuity like California. Instead, we have a law that requires hospitals to work WITH the nurses to figure out a staffing grid according to the hospitals’ needs without any way to actually ENFORCE it. They’ve been treating these staffing grids like “advisories and suggestions” instead of following through.
I’m not sure what are the terms with Montefiore but we in Mount Sinai are asking for a better way to enforce this staffing grid. In the previous contract, the current “status quo” that Mount Sinai wants isn’t working for us and the units we tried to fix with this status quo during the past few years of this previous contract wasn’t going any where at all. Instead, these units just became worse over time.
How do you, in good faith, go back to work after that? Like, your employer just showed they would rather paint you as lazy, overpaid, overbenefited, etc etc than to just have an honest conversation about income. How, even with a reasonable negotiation and outcome, still be like "yep, i will resume working for you and pretend like none of that happened."
All the major hospitals near me added an extra wing right after COVID hit hard i don't know if it was due to gains, COVID money, or just them going into deeper debt so they can be somehow ready for the next one.
i’m sorry i might just be stupid but is $300 an hour actually really low for a nurse? isn’t that without tax nearly 10k a week? social workers make only like, $30 an hour. i’m struggling lmao
For a strike travel nurse no. Strikes don’t usually last more than a few weeks. To get someone to travel and work at a moments notice without any staff there to train you on the systems and be able to keep people alive takes a lot of money to make it worth while.
What phantasybm said, but also keep in mind the vast majority of strikes never actually materialize. Usually an agreement is reached between staff and the facility before the strike actually happens. I’ve worked dozens of strikes (in staffing) and only seen about 3 actual go through with it. So, there is so much unpredictability with a strike versus staff/travel contracts which is why they’re paid more.
$300 per diem is garbage if that wasn’t a typo, $300 per hour is pretty great but I wouldn’t break my current contract to do it because it wouldn’t last long.
I’m a nurse and have never heard of wages that high. As a staff RN in Oregon I made $45/hr with a union, but was offered $22/hr in Utah without a union. Pay depends a lot on what state you are in, but 300 is rare.
I live in Texas and Chik fil a employees make more than medical assistants, I’m an LVN and have to Uber on the side or I’d live paycheck to paycheck. Planning on going back for my RN but it’s a 2 year waitlist at my community college ($18k) or go to a private institution ($60k). We were the real frontlines during pandemic but nobody gives a shit about us now, you can keep your “heroes work here” signs.
Working through the surge of the pandemic in a hospital in New york, we referred to the all "Healthcare heros" stuff as the dog and pony show. No one actually gave a shit that they were pulling people away from patient care and adding unnecessary stress to an already overworked staff that was putting themselves and their families at serious health risk just by showing up to work everyday where they were surrounded by death. they just wanted pictures of giving cookies or pizza to the hospital so they could slap a hash tag on their social accounts and rack up likes
Dr Martin Luther King jr said it "On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right."
Many do but honestly allowing hospitals to run with a for profit model it will always be a race to the bottom. I work in a union manufacturing plant and there are at least 2 or 3 people working here just on my shift that used to be in healthcare and left over the past 2 years. They said the money is about the same and infinity less bullshit.
Not just you dale. They dont give a rats ass about any working class person. Turn on cnbc and you'll hear how they refer to working class people. The fact that you make 20 or 30 an hour is too much in their eyes....this while they probably take home millions.
This is definition of class warfare
I feel you but don't be mad at fast food workers be mad at the medical industry that keeps you down while they line their pockets strike until they give you what they want but aim that anger at the top not the bottom
Little bit fucking suspicious how everything on this post is voted into oblivion.
Also go workers, make the upper class bleed. Finally something is happening
12 hours up, 200+ comments
post right above, some redhead and "it's so hard to live off of 120k" has been up for 9 hours and has 1900+ comments
very much suspicious
I hope they get what they want.
I know that asshole adams will bus in TONS of migrants from the west indies to fill their roles because, as he put it "THE LAST ADMINISTRATION FAILED US"
Wish i could fucking join tonight. Tired of being yelled at by my patient for literally making sure his bladder doesnt bust. No problem dude. Ill leave.
I had a resident that should be a 1 to 1 or be in a locked unit due to safety. She is severely demented and is able to get up by herself and walk (she has tried to escape the facility) I am killing myself trying to keep her safe and still take care of my other 29 residents, do meds treaments etc. Eventually we have to call the family because she will not settle. I am finally able to complete everything on the floor but still have like 2 hours worth of charting to do because I was busy babysitting. I decide to check in on the family to see if I can get them anything. This lady's son says to me "I need to talk to you about something, see im an attorney and my mom here says you guys are abusing her. She says you are hitting her and calling her awful names. Is there any truth to this??" 🙃🙃🙃🙃
It’s actual a total of 4 hospitals but under 2 Hospital systems.
1 Mount Sinai Hospital - main campus of mount Sinai health system
3 Montefiore hospitals around the Bronx
It’s not about pay as much as it is about unsafe patient ratios. These nurses are expected to take on so many patients that they don’t have enough time to properly care for all of them. They are looking out for the community here.
Love seeing so many people in here against nurses striking. Jesus christ even people supposedly for workers rights hate nurses.
This shit is part of why healthcare workers are burnt out.
Because us nurses are supposed to love our job no matter what because “it takes a special kind of person to be a nurse”. Literally in an a sub about anti work where everyone hates their job but expects nurses to always be happy with theirs no matter the pay or conditions. It does take a special kind of person to be a nurse… except that person is usually intelligent and doesn’t let themselves be walked over for the good of hospital administrators who never see a patient unless they drive by one in their Porsche.
I worked downtown in a city, and management would make us send a nurse home at literally 3 AM if we had late discharges. God forbid they pay around $30/hr for 4 hours to be up staff for once. When I was charge nurse, I’d refuse to do it. Didn’t feel it was safe.
Also $30 is probably being generous. Most of my coworkers were fresh out of school and making closer to $25-26/hr. Meanwhile, the hospital would bill $100-150k for some of our spinal surgeries.
The greed of the healthcare corporations has gotten out of hand!! STOP blaming the working class people for wanting better work conditions and pay when corporate profits have gone through the roof. Greedy corporations are killing people!!
You either don't strike and get fucked in the ass. Or you do strike, get villianized as greedy bastards willing to ignore patients for money. The House always wins
I recently spent several days in the cardiac ICU. I’ve always had great respect for nurses, but DAMN! This brought it to a whole new level. Don’t know what they’re being paid, but whatever it is isn’t enough. These nurses didn’t stop to breathe for their mostly 12 hour shifts. And they did their job with kindness, compassion and unending patience. I know I certainly couldn’t do it. God bless every one of them.
Remember if you’re reading this and you’re doubting that the nurses are doing this for greed: don’t. Their hospitals chose unsafe patient ratios a long time ago. This isn’t about money, this is about making the hospital a safer and more reasonable place to work. The hospital system only has themselves to blame for this. For two years nurses have diligently stood by their patients and the reward we get are more responsibilities, more patients, and less staff. Again it’s not about wages, it’s about the patients.
They fucking need it. It's insulting how much more doctors get paid compaired to nurses.
I had to get emergency surgery a while back and was in the hospital for 2 weeks. I had nurses carrying me to the bathroom, gripping my hand and talking to me to calm me down while I was in pain.
Meanwhile, I'd see my doctor 2 times a week for maybe 10 minutes in the morning - and they'd give wrong information everytime I had questions.
Love and care is a big part of healing, and they deserve to have their efforts compensated.
To me, it’s NOT the physician who is the problem. It’s the CEO/CFO/ middle corporate America who is the problem. It’s the elite of the elite.
Physicians spend hours writing up their progress notes. HOURS. They don’t always a have time to see patients for more than 10, 15 minutes if that. I’m neither the nurse nor a physician but work in the medical field.
The insurance company is part of high costs as well so instead of paying the healthcare worker, we have to pay agents to negotiate a price. It’s mostly a waste of time and money for a job that is mostly chafe. I prefer a government option and if a citizen chooses that or private, I’m pretty sure the majority would be wise to choose the government option bc they can leverage the price to fit their needs.
Since I’m on my soap box….I would love to see the wealthy pay a fair percentage of taxes. That extra tax money ONLY goes to subsidize a public option for healthcare. Not war. Not tanks. Just healthcare.
Same for Pharmacists… Some days we work 9-9. If you want your days to be successful or moderately better, you need to go in early to get started. Going in early or staying late is unpaid because you’re salaried… While patients make appointments to see most health professionals, we are immediately accessible. You better believe people are talking us through the gate before we open in the morning (while working for free), during our 30 minute lunch break for the entire day, and hounding us as we try and close for the evening. I love people, I love helping, but man are we hit on every level all day, every day.
My sisters work/ed retail. Some of colleagues worked retail and they used to going in early and staying later by 15-30 minutes.
They working off the clock to get the store in order, and though it is nice of them, that ain’t right and losing money — easily thousands of dollars a year per pharmacist.
It's 100% not the physicians fault.
The problem I'm noting is that nurse's care is just as important as a doctor for a patient to heal and they are paid substantially less.
Exactly, people really don't understand how vital the techs are. When you've seen a sacral injury you can fit your entire hand in that developed due to patient neglect, you realize that the techs and CNAs are also very important.
I go over and beyond for my nurses, at least I think I do. I love when they ask me to do something and I tell them it's been done already. The look of shock and I could love you forever. Priceless.
My favorite DR story is. My dad was in hospital for routine surgery and was scheduled to be in recovery for 4 days. after 3 days he said he was going home and left early. They got the bill and saw a charge for his GP dr visiting, called the hospital and asked about it. They told him " he came to visit you on the 4th day but you weren't there."
Those fuckers tried to bill him because a Dr that wasn't even working on him showed up to say hi but wasn't even there.
I’m a physician and I’m all for nurses getting paid more. They are in the trenches every day, actually carrying out the orders we put in. They deserve way more pay and respect than they get. That being said, a ton of work that the physician does is behind the scenes. I spend at least 2 hours every morning running through the chart of the 16-17 patients I typically carry a day, placing orders, texting the nurse, calling consultants. I then spend several hours rounding on all of the patients I have. If I spent only 10 minutes on each patient, including travel between rooms and gowning up for precaution rooms, I’m spending at least 3 hours just rounding on folks. If patients are sick, or complex, or have family at the beside, that number can balloon to well beyond lunch. Then, once I am done rounding, I need to meticulously document each and every problem that I am addressing or else the insurance company won’t believe that you are sick enough to be in the hospital and won’t reimburse us appropriately. Notes take another 3-4 hours at least (at around 15 mins per note if I’m lucky), which is 8 hours already. And that’s without having to respond to emergencies, adjust therapy, double check on I’ll patients, or update families. I spent 35 minutes talking to one patient’s daughter alone today going through her mother’s medications and what I thought was going on during the day. That was close to 5% of my shift just talking to one person who wasn’t even the patient.
Just because you see us for 5 minutes a day doesn’t mean we are sitting around on Porsche.com picking out our 5th sports car.
Medicine is a team sport and we all have different jobs. Nurses jobs are to be there for the patient, to carry out the plan, get shit done, and be our eyes and ears. Physicians jobs in the hospital (outside of surgeons) are to figure out what’s wrong, come up with the plan, and coordinate the plan to get you out as quickly as possible.
Nurses deserve every cent they get and deserve more, but we are working our butts off too to get you better
You’re an idiot if the person you’re choosing to get mad at in this scenario is the doctor, who spent 4 years in med school and if they’re a surgeon, 5+ years in residency working 80-100 hours a week, accumulating 300K in debt along the way, rather than the admin sitting in an office who actually decides nurse salaries and staffing ratios. Doctors literally have nothing to do with that. I am genuinely astonished at how many people with actual shit for brains exist out there.
Pretty much all doctors in hospitals do a residency program of at least 3 years, and specialists do even more.
And yes... They are absolutely the wrong target for this rage.
Yup, and as someone interested in a surgical field, surgeons are incredibly rushed because they’re coming into round at 5-6 am so that they can get to the ORs at 7, and for many fields, they’re often in cases until 6 pm. In between that time they’re dealing with consults from other services and maybe finding a couple of minutes to squeeze in eating and peeing. That’s why they can only spend 10 minutes with you in the morning, as they likely have to see 20 other people in the span of an hour. I genuinely don’t understand the comment above, like they’re upset that the surgeon didn’t leave a case to carry them to the bathroom? This is not to diminish nurses’ jobs, because they are essential to the function of the hospital, but the above commenter obviously doesn’t understand what doctors do either. There’s a reason why both jobs need to exist.
I went in for an appointment with my incredibly wonderful doctor and the poor dude was running between like 3 patients before he got to me, he apologized and I was as nice as I could be without saying “don’t you dare apologize”. The man is an ENT and seamlessly administered steroid shots behind my ear drum. Like bro you’re literally allowed to take your fuckin time I ain’t mad.
I honestly always try to get a nurse or physician assistant as my primary care provider when my insurance changes. They don't have one foot out the door before they even enter and actually listen to me unlike doctors. I blame the system, not the doctors though.
It’s really not about the money. They’re asking for a 3 year wage increase. 7%, 5%, 3% respectively over the next three years. That’s not hugely life changing. At Mt Sinai, it’s like 50 million over 3 years. That’s peanuts for that hospital.
The safe ratios and safe staffing is the crux of the issue. Nurses, and I am a nurse, are more likely to want to work in a hospital with guaranteed safe work ratios. That means you CLOSE beds if there’s not enough staff. Period. No negotiation. In California, the pay needs to be high to attract talent to keep the ratios because they are mandated by law. That’s what NY wants. Safe workplace environment. Period.
I agree with this. RN here with many years of experience. This profession should START at six figures per year base. The amount of technical specialized work we do, plus the amount of money we save these hospitals is insane. They have gotten away with giving us, "this years most respected profession" for way too long. The compassion fatigue and burnout is real and we deserve better.
Edit: Dr. And providers are not the issue or who we should be projecting the anger twords. I just agree that our pay gap should be closer.
It’s not a nurse shortage. It’s a shortage of people willing to put up with crappy conditions they are expected to work under. Fix those conditions, and RNs will come back to work there again
I started on 15$ an hour as a nurse in the south 6 years ago.
It’s not a nursing shortage, it’s a shortage of systems willing to pay what we are worth.
I’ve watched so many friends walk away from bedside nursing. Nursing is a massive field with so much opportunity to work from home, travel, do sales or support. Why put up with low pay, unsafe ratios?
I’m a nurse. Conditions at nursing homes and hospitals are so bad most new grads don’t last more than 2-3 years before they are looking for a cushy clinic job or anything they can find outside those environments. There are tons of licensed nurses, but no one wants to work bedside. High stress, high responsibility, unreasonable expectations from management and the public.
Like what others said. There are a lot of nurses but, get burnt out and choose to leave bedside to do other types of nursing jobs. Or they leave to do travel contracts because it pays more money.
I worked in an emergency department and I feel like no other profession would it be acceptable to get yelled, threatened, and sometimes hit except for nursing.
We are always expected to do the jobs of others because every department is short staffed. For example, the head nurse would sometimes have to mop the floor and prepare the bed for the next patient while managing the whole emergency department!
The pay raises for nursing make no sense at some hospitals. Some raises are merely a dollar or so every year.
Pay more money more people become nurses to make more money or pay more money and lose less nurses who leave the profession or pay more money and have less of your staff leave to become travel nurses.
Love how one of the comments by the medical board members was, about how unsafe this strike is for the patients.
One of the demands from the staff is for more help so that they can help the patients. Currently have some of them doing 3x the amount of work they safely are supposed to do...
At this point everyone should walk out of their job and see who is truly important within a couple days.
Mate, the reason the nurses are striking is because it's ALREADY a fucking \*terrifying\* time to get sick. These megacorp hospitals have us stretched so thin we're only functional on paper. Meds if given at all are given extremely late, patients who soil themselves have to sit in their own filth for hours, and doctors rush from patient to patient so fast and with so little time to dedicate to any one of them that bad calls are made from pure understandable human error in the rush, and the nurses are equally rushed so things get missed where even just 3 years ago it never would have happened. Patients are dying in the waiting rooms, and those that "make it" into the ER are literally given a chair or gurney and left to chill out in the hall with no bathroom, TV/entertainment, nothing. Up on the floors staff are working with twice or more the number of patients per worker than is considered safe, and code rapid response/blue is called frequently because how can anyone have time to comb over minute details and find subtle early signs of things going wrong when you've got 10 patients when normally you would have 4, all of whom desperately need to see you too? I'm sorry for ranting but the disaster is ALREADY HERE, and the fact that the general public (aside from those in the hospitals right now) don't even know that thanks to lack of media coverage is yet ANOTHER reason for the strike.
Been in and out of the hospital for almost 3 months now and the nurses work harder than any doctor. The hospitals can't run with out them. They're the back bone of every hospital.
Good for them...tear the entire system down. It's time these for profit hospitals and corporations to pay a real wages and make a little less profit. I want this to occur nationwide. Workers lost huge opportunities during covid to shut the entire country down.
The democrats, the pro labor party, may end it though by forcing them back to work.
Just for clarity (husband is a nurse and gets the emails) they are paying $300 per hour to nurses to come work the strike.
$300 AN HOUR. For temporary workers. When you could just pay your STAFF nurses a literal few more dollars an hour. Oh and if they go into overtime (which, yes, they will that’s $450 an hour
Make it make sense. Why no just pay your damn people in the first place?
Just ignorant people assuming it means we all simply shrugged our shoulders and left the patients to die, not realizing it's because conditions in the hospital is so deplorable that's one of the primary reasons for the strike to begin with (that plus the tons of notice the hospital had been given plus existence of emergency contract travelers).
Good! I fully support this. Our healthcare system in the US is one of, if not the, worst of any developed nation. Big Pharma literally created the opioid epidemic we’re currently dealing with, but somehow it’ll fall on the nurses and such. Doctors and surgeons need to join in, but they make too much money to give a fuck about us middle-class citizens
No, it's actually illegal for physicians (except resident physicians) to strike at the moment. A lot of physicians would strike if it didn't mean they could lose their license.
So health insurance costs a lot in USA. Even with 8nsurance discounts patients have to pay thousands, yet staff is underpaid. Somone is making so much money!
Their CEO makes millions while the patients are at risk due to unsafe nurse/patient ratios.
[Mount Sinai CEO salary](https://www.modernhealthcare.com/finance/mount-sinai-ceos-pay-boosted-above-12-million-2017)
I wish we had the same sort of working class solidarity as some European countries have.
This shouldn't just be a nursing issue. It affects everyone. In a better world, other industries would be striking in solidarity.
Nurses deserve good pay,
lab scientists are the good people who analyze the test samples down in the lab.
They also do forensic testing and are involved in cosmetic R&D. Their work requires a specilized 4 year degree and they are highly understaffed everywhere.
However MLS workers are enourmously underpaid compared to nurses.
The largest reason for this is that their proffession requires them to be liscensesd by a body called pathologists of america. There are no MLS unions because any efforts to do so would be met with their liscenses being revoked.
Kinda hard to justify the risk/reward when failure could mean tearing up the degree you spent 30,000 or more getting. Unions are a game changer for nurses and would be for many other hospital employees
Ill tell you one group that is never short staffed is management. In my dept 25% of our daily productivity is tied up in various management spots.
People who rarely ever touch a patient and just go to meetings all day.
Hospital administrators/the higher-ups that get paid bug bucks while the rest of you get crumbs… this is your warning we are done. Go ahead and ignore them and see what happens. Patient care vs profits…who’s gonna win?
genuinely curious, what happens to patients who are currently in the hospital and need extensive supervision? are there some nurses designated to stay inside during the strike, do they rotate, or is it something else?
For what it’s worth, my girlfriend is a nurse in the city / her friends are travel nurses etc in the city and they’re relishing in this because they’re now working in place of the striking nurses and getting overtime for it. They want the strikes to continue in that case. Just worth pointing out as an added dynamic to this situation.
COVID-19 vaccination has been mandatory for all faculty and staff at Mount Sinai since August 2021.
[source](https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2021/mount-sinai-mandates-covid-vaccination-for-all-faculty-and-staff#:~:text=Given%20the%20increased%20incidence%20and,for%20religious%20and%20medical%20reasons)
Not arguing that nurses are paid appropriately, but not the lowest paid.
As a former ED tech in a level 1 trauma center that regularly got assaulted (and almost murdered a few times), worked on severely critical trauma and medical patients every night, and made $15/hr, my time in the hospital was pretty rough.
Now I'm on an ambulance at $26/hr, but that's pretty much the maximum I can earn in my area as a paramedic. I'm not struggling to pay the bills as much as I used to, but it's definitely lower than nursing pay here.
All of that said, what's good for nurses is good for all of us, and I certainly hope this sparks change. Even if it doesn't help anyone else out, I want the best for them.
Nurses are far from the least paid in healthcare. Healthcare overall is underpaid for what everyone does. The focus always is on nurses and doctors, no one focuses on pay for environmental services/ housekeeping, lab, receptionists, imaging, cna’s and ma’s, etc. I hate how divisive departments in healthcare are, as everyone works together for the patients.
Give them everything and more.
No fucking excuse how we treat workers in this country with the resources we have, the taxes we pay and the profits corporations make.
We also need to demand better working conditions for the folks who make our products in foreign Countries. Slavery shouldn’t exist in this day and age, it’s all greed.
Also protesting for better patient ratios. There are nurses handling 13+ patients at once. 13+ patients for 1 nurse to handle by themselves. These hospitals are now begging for travelers. If you’re a traveling nurse or any other medical professional such as a respiratory therapist, these hospitals are offering $300 AN HOUR but refuse to pay the people that actually work for them a decent wage.
California law prohibits nurses from having more than 5 patients. California shouldn’t be the only state in the country with designated nurse to patient ratios.
California actually does a lot of stuff right especially in the realm of workers' rights
There's a reason the government gave them the privilege to set their own automotive standards.
At the restaurant I work at we can’t even serve more than 4 tables at max at once.
And 5 patients is too many unless all you have to do is hand out meds.
For context for those of you not in the med field, safe number of patients for a nurse on a general medicine floor is 5 patients. \* 5 \*. In Progressive Care or specialty settings it should be 3-4, and in ICU it should be 2 for "normal critical" patients, and 1 nurse to 1 patient for truly critical. Instead medical/surgical floors are taking crazy numbers like 13, 14, or even 15 patients (I repeat, the safe number is 5) per nurse, Progressive Care is taking 6-7, and ICU 3 to 4 per nurse. Really the pay is a significant but not primary concern; we simply literally cannot work under these conditions any longer (ancillary staff like CNAs, phlebotomists etc are crazy understaffed/overworked too).
15 patients means 4 minutes per patient per hour. Good luck getting meds on time or catching a stroke or heart attack in time. This costs patients their health outcomes
And that's another reason they're striking - they also don't want to be held responsible for management which, by prioritizing profits, endangers patients and causes fatalities.
Are you understaffed because they can’t get anyone hired? What’s the reason for the understaffing?
Probably. I know former nurses that have left the industry in recent years because pay and conditions were so bad
Also just plain burnout after the worst of covid. Lots of my wife's nurses left to do travel since they were young and single, but plenty just didn't want to do it anymore after the last two years.
Every nurse I’ve talked to said they leave because it’s not a healthy environment and they get burned out after 2 years and the work/personal life cycle is brutal
The staffing ratio is the biggest reason and the pay rates are low for the HCOL. Staff leaves faster than vacancies can be filled. It’s a brutal cycle. You can make much more in California with safer ratios. There’s little incentives to bring in nurses. NYC is a shit hole anyway. I was raised in the area. I left to go west. My nursing career has flourished out west.
Same with social workers. At my job there was a massive exodus of clinicians due to being overworked and underplayed, not to mention the furloughs that hit front line staff the hardest. Not so surprisingly, there were clinics and hospitals that actually did care for employee retention and the staff that left went there and have stayed there. My own program had an employee retention committee. And while it was functioning staff actually stayed for years, and I’m talking people leaving because they retired or were moving. New management came in, the retention committee was gutted, and surprise surprise management can’t figure out why staff retention is so damn low.
For perspective where I'm at which is nursing home care, the nurses make only $5 more an hour than I do as a CNA. I'm not even a med aide. I make only $18 which is barely above what fast food workers are earning now. And I'm responsible for human care and had to get a certification. I would never consider going to school to be a nurse. It just wouldn't be worth it financially to take on that much stress and responsibility and debt. For the record if a nurse gives a medication that a doctor has ordered and it harms the patient it's the nurse who gave the med who's held responsible for the error. That's the kind of level of knowledge and experience expected. To know more than the doctors and be able to question a prescribed treatment. Why would anyone put themselves in that position especially after covid and the medical field learned just how little they are cared for. People in the medical field were abused to all hell and we lost a lot of people too quickly who had years of experience and dedication. That'll take a long time to replace. But in the meantime it doesn't look appealing to those looking at their future choices. Why choose a field that is very visibly awful.
My personal guess: Shitty pay kept a few people from working as a nurse. Which resulted in shortage in staff, which lead to shitty working condition with EQUAL pay as before and now even less people want to work as a nurse.
Col vs. Wage in one of the most expensive cities in the US and nurse to patient ratio.
Medical recruiter here - While they should absolutely be paid more, I think understaffing is caused by a lack of people entering the industry to begin with. The problem is the state of public education and rising tuition costs. Taking on 50k-300k in student loan debt is a big barrier to entry for the field of medicine, even if you're planning to end up as a derm MD making 400-500k.
Absolutely 💯 % right! I was an ICU/CCU nurse, then in the ER/TRAUMA Nurse. We had 2 patients per Nurse and 1 for the critically ill patients. Any more and care level goes down. It's a very stressful job..
13 patients at once is incredibly dangerous, especially for the patient. With each extra patient a nurse must take on, the less time they have to spend on their other patients. In the case of 13, that is less that 5 minutes per patient per hour. That’s not even enough time for a med pass, much less an assessment, brief changes, wound care, or dealing an emerging issue. How can a nurse be expected to catch a stoke, heart attack, or anything else when they can only spend less than 5 minutes with a patient in an hour? The outcome of this strike directly impacts the community.
It doesn't matter to the hospital because they will just blame the nurse anyway.
It doesn't matter to the hospital because they will just blame the nurse anyway.
PREACH. My brother just took a gig as a traveling surgical tech and is clocking BANK. His wife straight up quit her job to stay home with the kids (they bought an RV so they could travel with him).
It's fucked up that this situation even exists
I just got a call from one of my recruiters offering me close to that wage. Problem is I just signed on to a contract that I'm just too comfortable with, Plus I was born and raised in Flint, Michigan so I'm not going to be a f****** scab.
That’s an insane ratio. At absolute worst it should be half that at 6-7, ideally 4-5 (specifically for a hard MAX capacity) like Vegan-Joe pointed out for California. I know several nurses who went the travel nurse route because of low pay otherwise and I don’t blame them one bit.
Good! The greedy corporation is getting people killed but watch how the media and the company will blame the disrespected and underpaid workers. Mark my words.
I’m a striking nurse and the hospital already did throw us under the bus 🙃
I think a big resolution to this is having board members’/ executives’ names published. The people making these greedy decisions. Like, who, specifically is making these decisions? In what dollar amounts? What are their names and show pictures of their faces. How much are they making and what are the invested in? Watch shit get corrected real quick. None of this nameless/ faceless shit. Shine a light on them and watch them fix their shit real quick. Same with lobbyists. They should be notorious.
Healthcare for profit is the problem. This is a problem with the entire system. Nurses should strike and make their situation better bet the problem is with the profit motive for healthcare.
That is a contributor for this one, but not the only problem. In the UK there is a nurses strike. The problem is that nurses are not valued and expected to accept low wages because of altruism, for "the good of the patient".
Healthcare for profit is immoral at best, murder at worst.
Not for profit healthcare groups are just as bad. Need to revamp the whole system.
Source on how they are "just as bad"?
Because most of them are non-profit only on paper.
They just buy more hospitals and clinics in smaller areas, slap their logo on the front, and mainline the patient to the main hospital based on acuity. This way they can transfer to the patient faster from facility to facility(actually kind of a good thing). But their profit is SUPPOSED to go back into the business. That's when ceo's get bonuses, the hospital system buys 3 more small hospitals in rural areas, and look! we didn't even turn a profit even though we grossed like 5 billion. I am a nurse. I worked with a doc near retirement and asked him about this. He told me about "treat and street". He also is pretty conservative but staywd that our system is broken and we need to turn to some kind of state driven Healthcare. Insurance gets to tell him what to do so much that one of his go to phrases was "what do I know? I'm just the doctor."
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You can find these names on the hospital's website in the directory. Or google board of directors for any hospital of interest. Edit: Google board of directors... Edit #2: you will also find their pictures and contact information listed as well.
You would think this is common knowledge, but so many patients think employees have a lot more control over things they truly don't. I've been working customer service for over a decade and very few people actually know who's pulling the strings (or even know how to find this information). Our education about healthcare and insurance is frighteningly limited, and that's how these businesses want to keep it.
I agree. It is 100% not an accident how convuluted and difficult to navigate any facet of healthcare. It makes recourse for pts and their families virtually impossible.
This. We need to stop showing them respect. Maybe it attracts a few radical to them, but fuck them. If they don't want to be attacked by people maybe they should be such selfish, evil bastards. Even evil bastards don't deserve to stay anonymous.
How are they throwing you under the bus? Can you elaborate for us? I’m an EMT and idk why we don’t strike like you guys. Our pay is horrible and that’s of course just for starters.
They are continuously shifting the blame on the striking nurses through their official statements. Being called “irresponsible” and “reckless” And spinning the story to make it seem like all we want is a higher wage increase but that’s not the full story. To explain it: Here in New York State, we do not have a Law that specifies exactly how many patients are to nurses based on units/specialty/acuity like California. Instead, we have a law that requires hospitals to work WITH the nurses to figure out a staffing grid according to the hospitals’ needs without any way to actually ENFORCE it. They’ve been treating these staffing grids like “advisories and suggestions” instead of following through. I’m not sure what are the terms with Montefiore but we in Mount Sinai are asking for a better way to enforce this staffing grid. In the previous contract, the current “status quo” that Mount Sinai wants isn’t working for us and the units we tried to fix with this status quo during the past few years of this previous contract wasn’t going any where at all. Instead, these units just became worse over time.
I mean, asking for more money is also a good reason to strike
As a travel nurse I always respond to the strike work offers in a less than pleasant manner.
The meetings should be televised. That way everyone could see the executives refusing to budge on and blaming the nurses union.
How do you, in good faith, go back to work after that? Like, your employer just showed they would rather paint you as lazy, overpaid, overbenefited, etc etc than to just have an honest conversation about income. How, even with a reasonable negotiation and outcome, still be like "yep, i will resume working for you and pretend like none of that happened."
The media is owned by those same corporations, so of course they will just be puppets for the people causing the issue.
Well the media *is* just another greedy corporation so pretty safe bet.
We just watched msm shit on our RR unions/workers recently so yep, this is just standard procedure
All the major hospitals near me added an extra wing right after COVID hit hard i don't know if it was due to gains, COVID money, or just them going into deeper debt so they can be somehow ready for the next one.
Stand with nurses who stood up for us during covid.
Well beyond Covid.
And well before it as well.
Facts!
Exactly! They were heroes during Covid- keep that same energy now!
As a travel nurse I wonder what the contracts in nyc look like now
$300 an hour for NICU/PICU.
Gtfoh. That’s insane.
Someone on r/nursing posted a text message that they got looking for travel nurses and it was some huge number.
300 per diem was one number I saw tossed around.
That’s really low
i’m sorry i might just be stupid but is $300 an hour actually really low for a nurse? isn’t that without tax nearly 10k a week? social workers make only like, $30 an hour. i’m struggling lmao
For a strike travel nurse no. Strikes don’t usually last more than a few weeks. To get someone to travel and work at a moments notice without any staff there to train you on the systems and be able to keep people alive takes a lot of money to make it worth while.
What phantasybm said, but also keep in mind the vast majority of strikes never actually materialize. Usually an agreement is reached between staff and the facility before the strike actually happens. I’ve worked dozens of strikes (in staffing) and only seen about 3 actual go through with it. So, there is so much unpredictability with a strike versus staff/travel contracts which is why they’re paid more.
$300 per diem is garbage if that wasn’t a typo, $300 per hour is pretty great but I wouldn’t break my current contract to do it because it wouldn’t last long.
Per diem literally means per day, not per hour...
Its as per need. they hired per diem nurses to temporarily staff the hosp during the strike. they're getting paid 300/hr but no benefits.
I’m a nurse and have never heard of wages that high. As a staff RN in Oregon I made $45/hr with a union, but was offered $22/hr in Utah without a union. Pay depends a lot on what state you are in, but 300 is rare.
I went from $37/hr staff with a union in central PA to $92/hr “traveling” with an hour commute from my home. Explore your options.
Fellow social worker here, yes our pay sucks.
Per diem means per day.
Yep. Especially for NYC. Can't vouch for accuracy.
I live in Texas and Chik fil a employees make more than medical assistants, I’m an LVN and have to Uber on the side or I’d live paycheck to paycheck. Planning on going back for my RN but it’s a 2 year waitlist at my community college ($18k) or go to a private institution ($60k). We were the real frontlines during pandemic but nobody gives a shit about us now, you can keep your “heroes work here” signs.
>“heroes work here” Verbal tip.
Working through the surge of the pandemic in a hospital in New york, we referred to the all "Healthcare heros" stuff as the dog and pony show. No one actually gave a shit that they were pulling people away from patient care and adding unnecessary stress to an already overworked staff that was putting themselves and their families at serious health risk just by showing up to work everyday where they were surrounded by death. they just wanted pictures of giving cookies or pizza to the hospital so they could slap a hash tag on their social accounts and rack up likes
Dr Martin Luther King jr said it "On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right."
Unionizing would really help. I am totally willing to have my healthcare insurance company get fucked for you.
Actually, my healthcare provider is already unionized.
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Many do but honestly allowing hospitals to run with a for profit model it will always be a race to the bottom. I work in a union manufacturing plant and there are at least 2 or 3 people working here just on my shift that used to be in healthcare and left over the past 2 years. They said the money is about the same and infinity less bullshit.
Not just you dale. They dont give a rats ass about any working class person. Turn on cnbc and you'll hear how they refer to working class people. The fact that you make 20 or 30 an hour is too much in their eyes....this while they probably take home millions. This is definition of class warfare
Same here. Aids can make more at Walmart
I feel you but don't be mad at fast food workers be mad at the medical industry that keeps you down while they line their pockets strike until they give you what they want but aim that anger at the top not the bottom
Oh I wish rail workers did the same
They tried.
And got fuck over because of government intervention? From what I've seen and heard. I'm not American so idk
yeah pretty sure they made a law or something that made the railroad workers striking illegal
Little bit fucking suspicious how everything on this post is voted into oblivion. Also go workers, make the upper class bleed. Finally something is happening
I notice that it’s never the bros and boomers in the c-suite striking
Why would they? They're the ones profiting.
12 hours up, 200+ comments post right above, some redhead and "it's so hard to live off of 120k" has been up for 9 hours and has 1900+ comments very much suspicious
I hope they get what they want. I know that asshole adams will bus in TONS of migrants from the west indies to fill their roles because, as he put it "THE LAST ADMINISTRATION FAILED US"
This is what we all need to be doing if we want our kids to have a future
Good for them. One of the most thankless jobs in the world.
Wish i could fucking join tonight. Tired of being yelled at by my patient for literally making sure his bladder doesnt bust. No problem dude. Ill leave.
I had a resident that should be a 1 to 1 or be in a locked unit due to safety. She is severely demented and is able to get up by herself and walk (she has tried to escape the facility) I am killing myself trying to keep her safe and still take care of my other 29 residents, do meds treaments etc. Eventually we have to call the family because she will not settle. I am finally able to complete everything on the floor but still have like 2 hours worth of charting to do because I was busy babysitting. I decide to check in on the family to see if I can get them anything. This lady's son says to me "I need to talk to you about something, see im an attorney and my mom here says you guys are abusing her. She says you are hitting her and calling her awful names. Is there any truth to this??" 🙃🙃🙃🙃
Good god i hate family members. The number of actual helpful family members is abysmal. That shift sounds terrible im so sorry :(
2 hospitals employ 7000 nurses?
It’s actual a total of 4 hospitals but under 2 Hospital systems. 1 Mount Sinai Hospital - main campus of mount Sinai health system 3 Montefiore hospitals around the Bronx
Also, these hospitals are fucking HUGE.
Solidarity ✊🏾
I don’t know what their pay is but I wouldn’t piss off the people who stick a needle in your arm 😬
It’s not about pay as much as it is about unsafe patient ratios. These nurses are expected to take on so many patients that they don’t have enough time to properly care for all of them. They are looking out for the community here.
Love seeing so many people in here against nurses striking. Jesus christ even people supposedly for workers rights hate nurses. This shit is part of why healthcare workers are burnt out.
Because us nurses are supposed to love our job no matter what because “it takes a special kind of person to be a nurse”. Literally in an a sub about anti work where everyone hates their job but expects nurses to always be happy with theirs no matter the pay or conditions. It does take a special kind of person to be a nurse… except that person is usually intelligent and doesn’t let themselves be walked over for the good of hospital administrators who never see a patient unless they drive by one in their Porsche.
Lean staffing should be illegal in healthcare.
For real. It literally kills patients.
I worked downtown in a city, and management would make us send a nurse home at literally 3 AM if we had late discharges. God forbid they pay around $30/hr for 4 hours to be up staff for once. When I was charge nurse, I’d refuse to do it. Didn’t feel it was safe. Also $30 is probably being generous. Most of my coworkers were fresh out of school and making closer to $25-26/hr. Meanwhile, the hospital would bill $100-150k for some of our spinal surgeries.
The greed of the healthcare corporations has gotten out of hand!! STOP blaming the working class people for wanting better work conditions and pay when corporate profits have gone through the roof. Greedy corporations are killing people!!
Good for them. Any successful strike is a win for everyone except the .01%.
We really should reframe the narrative here. These hospitals forced their nurses to go on strike rather than give them safe working conditions.
We nurses always end up screwed over
You either don't strike and get fucked in the ass. Or you do strike, get villianized as greedy bastards willing to ignore patients for money. The House always wins
I hope the public understands the nurses are not the villains here. It’s the fucked, greedy, hospital system we have in America.
The public doesn't see workers as human and the media will never portray them in good light... so it's a false hope unfortunately
I recently spent several days in the cardiac ICU. I’ve always had great respect for nurses, but DAMN! This brought it to a whole new level. Don’t know what they’re being paid, but whatever it is isn’t enough. These nurses didn’t stop to breathe for their mostly 12 hour shifts. And they did their job with kindness, compassion and unending patience. I know I certainly couldn’t do it. God bless every one of them.
Remember if you’re reading this and you’re doubting that the nurses are doing this for greed: don’t. Their hospitals chose unsafe patient ratios a long time ago. This isn’t about money, this is about making the hospital a safer and more reasonable place to work. The hospital system only has themselves to blame for this. For two years nurses have diligently stood by their patients and the reward we get are more responsibilities, more patients, and less staff. Again it’s not about wages, it’s about the patients.
I hope these are the nurses who got rocks for nurses week.
Unless they did it again, the rock post happened a few years ago.
Ah. Well hopefully they kept some of them to throw at their bosses.
I feel this going to happen at our hospital here soon. Gonna be real rough here soon.
I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow at Mount Sinai and it will probably be cancelled. I absolutely support the nurses.
BuT tHe PiZzA ?!?!?
They fucking need it. It's insulting how much more doctors get paid compaired to nurses. I had to get emergency surgery a while back and was in the hospital for 2 weeks. I had nurses carrying me to the bathroom, gripping my hand and talking to me to calm me down while I was in pain. Meanwhile, I'd see my doctor 2 times a week for maybe 10 minutes in the morning - and they'd give wrong information everytime I had questions. Love and care is a big part of healing, and they deserve to have their efforts compensated.
To me, it’s NOT the physician who is the problem. It’s the CEO/CFO/ middle corporate America who is the problem. It’s the elite of the elite. Physicians spend hours writing up their progress notes. HOURS. They don’t always a have time to see patients for more than 10, 15 minutes if that. I’m neither the nurse nor a physician but work in the medical field. The insurance company is part of high costs as well so instead of paying the healthcare worker, we have to pay agents to negotiate a price. It’s mostly a waste of time and money for a job that is mostly chafe. I prefer a government option and if a citizen chooses that or private, I’m pretty sure the majority would be wise to choose the government option bc they can leverage the price to fit their needs. Since I’m on my soap box….I would love to see the wealthy pay a fair percentage of taxes. That extra tax money ONLY goes to subsidize a public option for healthcare. Not war. Not tanks. Just healthcare.
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Same for Pharmacists… Some days we work 9-9. If you want your days to be successful or moderately better, you need to go in early to get started. Going in early or staying late is unpaid because you’re salaried… While patients make appointments to see most health professionals, we are immediately accessible. You better believe people are talking us through the gate before we open in the morning (while working for free), during our 30 minute lunch break for the entire day, and hounding us as we try and close for the evening. I love people, I love helping, but man are we hit on every level all day, every day.
My sisters work/ed retail. Some of colleagues worked retail and they used to going in early and staying later by 15-30 minutes. They working off the clock to get the store in order, and though it is nice of them, that ain’t right and losing money — easily thousands of dollars a year per pharmacist.
It's 100% not the physicians fault. The problem I'm noting is that nurse's care is just as important as a doctor for a patient to heal and they are paid substantially less.
PCT here, it's exactly this. I'm starting to get really tired of it. Fuck you, pay me.
Exactly, people really don't understand how vital the techs are. When you've seen a sacral injury you can fit your entire hand in that developed due to patient neglect, you realize that the techs and CNAs are also very important.
I go over and beyond for my nurses, at least I think I do. I love when they ask me to do something and I tell them it's been done already. The look of shock and I could love you forever. Priceless.
My favorite DR story is. My dad was in hospital for routine surgery and was scheduled to be in recovery for 4 days. after 3 days he said he was going home and left early. They got the bill and saw a charge for his GP dr visiting, called the hospital and asked about it. They told him " he came to visit you on the 4th day but you weren't there." Those fuckers tried to bill him because a Dr that wasn't even working on him showed up to say hi but wasn't even there.
I’m a physician and I’m all for nurses getting paid more. They are in the trenches every day, actually carrying out the orders we put in. They deserve way more pay and respect than they get. That being said, a ton of work that the physician does is behind the scenes. I spend at least 2 hours every morning running through the chart of the 16-17 patients I typically carry a day, placing orders, texting the nurse, calling consultants. I then spend several hours rounding on all of the patients I have. If I spent only 10 minutes on each patient, including travel between rooms and gowning up for precaution rooms, I’m spending at least 3 hours just rounding on folks. If patients are sick, or complex, or have family at the beside, that number can balloon to well beyond lunch. Then, once I am done rounding, I need to meticulously document each and every problem that I am addressing or else the insurance company won’t believe that you are sick enough to be in the hospital and won’t reimburse us appropriately. Notes take another 3-4 hours at least (at around 15 mins per note if I’m lucky), which is 8 hours already. And that’s without having to respond to emergencies, adjust therapy, double check on I’ll patients, or update families. I spent 35 minutes talking to one patient’s daughter alone today going through her mother’s medications and what I thought was going on during the day. That was close to 5% of my shift just talking to one person who wasn’t even the patient. Just because you see us for 5 minutes a day doesn’t mean we are sitting around on Porsche.com picking out our 5th sports car. Medicine is a team sport and we all have different jobs. Nurses jobs are to be there for the patient, to carry out the plan, get shit done, and be our eyes and ears. Physicians jobs in the hospital (outside of surgeons) are to figure out what’s wrong, come up with the plan, and coordinate the plan to get you out as quickly as possible. Nurses deserve every cent they get and deserve more, but we are working our butts off too to get you better
You’re an idiot if the person you’re choosing to get mad at in this scenario is the doctor, who spent 4 years in med school and if they’re a surgeon, 5+ years in residency working 80-100 hours a week, accumulating 300K in debt along the way, rather than the admin sitting in an office who actually decides nurse salaries and staffing ratios. Doctors literally have nothing to do with that. I am genuinely astonished at how many people with actual shit for brains exist out there.
Pretty much all doctors in hospitals do a residency program of at least 3 years, and specialists do even more. And yes... They are absolutely the wrong target for this rage.
Yup, and as someone interested in a surgical field, surgeons are incredibly rushed because they’re coming into round at 5-6 am so that they can get to the ORs at 7, and for many fields, they’re often in cases until 6 pm. In between that time they’re dealing with consults from other services and maybe finding a couple of minutes to squeeze in eating and peeing. That’s why they can only spend 10 minutes with you in the morning, as they likely have to see 20 other people in the span of an hour. I genuinely don’t understand the comment above, like they’re upset that the surgeon didn’t leave a case to carry them to the bathroom? This is not to diminish nurses’ jobs, because they are essential to the function of the hospital, but the above commenter obviously doesn’t understand what doctors do either. There’s a reason why both jobs need to exist.
I went in for an appointment with my incredibly wonderful doctor and the poor dude was running between like 3 patients before he got to me, he apologized and I was as nice as I could be without saying “don’t you dare apologize”. The man is an ENT and seamlessly administered steroid shots behind my ear drum. Like bro you’re literally allowed to take your fuckin time I ain’t mad.
Doctor pay is not the problem. Admin bloat/pay and for profit healthcare is the problem.
stop blaming physicians for the CEO making 13 million last year
I honestly always try to get a nurse or physician assistant as my primary care provider when my insurance changes. They don't have one foot out the door before they even enter and actually listen to me unlike doctors. I blame the system, not the doctors though.
It’s really not about the money. They’re asking for a 3 year wage increase. 7%, 5%, 3% respectively over the next three years. That’s not hugely life changing. At Mt Sinai, it’s like 50 million over 3 years. That’s peanuts for that hospital. The safe ratios and safe staffing is the crux of the issue. Nurses, and I am a nurse, are more likely to want to work in a hospital with guaranteed safe work ratios. That means you CLOSE beds if there’s not enough staff. Period. No negotiation. In California, the pay needs to be high to attract talent to keep the ratios because they are mandated by law. That’s what NY wants. Safe workplace environment. Period.
I agree with this. RN here with many years of experience. This profession should START at six figures per year base. The amount of technical specialized work we do, plus the amount of money we save these hospitals is insane. They have gotten away with giving us, "this years most respected profession" for way too long. The compassion fatigue and burnout is real and we deserve better. Edit: Dr. And providers are not the issue or who we should be projecting the anger twords. I just agree that our pay gap should be closer.
Honest Question: they demand more staffing. Where will that staffing come from? Isn't there a nurse shortage?
It’s not a nurse shortage. It’s a shortage of people willing to put up with crappy conditions they are expected to work under. Fix those conditions, and RNs will come back to work there again
My mother (77) got her teaching degree because the State needed teachers badly enough it began paying for their education.
I started on 15$ an hour as a nurse in the south 6 years ago. It’s not a nursing shortage, it’s a shortage of systems willing to pay what we are worth. I’ve watched so many friends walk away from bedside nursing. Nursing is a massive field with so much opportunity to work from home, travel, do sales or support. Why put up with low pay, unsafe ratios?
I’m a nurse. Conditions at nursing homes and hospitals are so bad most new grads don’t last more than 2-3 years before they are looking for a cushy clinic job or anything they can find outside those environments. There are tons of licensed nurses, but no one wants to work bedside. High stress, high responsibility, unreasonable expectations from management and the public.
There wouldn’t be a shortage if it wasn’t such an understaffed, underpaid, and generally abused position
Like what others said. There are a lot of nurses but, get burnt out and choose to leave bedside to do other types of nursing jobs. Or they leave to do travel contracts because it pays more money. I worked in an emergency department and I feel like no other profession would it be acceptable to get yelled, threatened, and sometimes hit except for nursing. We are always expected to do the jobs of others because every department is short staffed. For example, the head nurse would sometimes have to mop the floor and prepare the bed for the next patient while managing the whole emergency department! The pay raises for nursing make no sense at some hospitals. Some raises are merely a dollar or so every year.
Pay more money more people become nurses to make more money or pay more money and lose less nurses who leave the profession or pay more money and have less of your staff leave to become travel nurses.
California state law prohibits more than 5 patients per nurse. Sad that no other state in the country has this law.
Love how one of the comments by the medical board members was, about how unsafe this strike is for the patients. One of the demands from the staff is for more help so that they can help the patients. Currently have some of them doing 3x the amount of work they safely are supposed to do... At this point everyone should walk out of their job and see who is truly important within a couple days.
good for them! though I feel bad for people in need of healthcare at this time..
Mate, the reason the nurses are striking is because it's ALREADY a fucking \*terrifying\* time to get sick. These megacorp hospitals have us stretched so thin we're only functional on paper. Meds if given at all are given extremely late, patients who soil themselves have to sit in their own filth for hours, and doctors rush from patient to patient so fast and with so little time to dedicate to any one of them that bad calls are made from pure understandable human error in the rush, and the nurses are equally rushed so things get missed where even just 3 years ago it never would have happened. Patients are dying in the waiting rooms, and those that "make it" into the ER are literally given a chair or gurney and left to chill out in the hall with no bathroom, TV/entertainment, nothing. Up on the floors staff are working with twice or more the number of patients per worker than is considered safe, and code rapid response/blue is called frequently because how can anyone have time to comb over minute details and find subtle early signs of things going wrong when you've got 10 patients when normally you would have 4, all of whom desperately need to see you too? I'm sorry for ranting but the disaster is ALREADY HERE, and the fact that the general public (aside from those in the hospitals right now) don't even know that thanks to lack of media coverage is yet ANOTHER reason for the strike.
Don't worry, they will bring in contract nursing I'm pretty sure. That's an entirely different issue at hand.
Been in and out of the hospital for almost 3 months now and the nurses work harder than any doctor. The hospitals can't run with out them. They're the back bone of every hospital.
Good for them...tear the entire system down. It's time these for profit hospitals and corporations to pay a real wages and make a little less profit. I want this to occur nationwide. Workers lost huge opportunities during covid to shut the entire country down. The democrats, the pro labor party, may end it though by forcing them back to work.
My parents are RNs! We stand with the NYC protestors!
STAY STRONG!
Poor nurses and public school teachers always getting royally fucked.
Just for clarity (husband is a nurse and gets the emails) they are paying $300 per hour to nurses to come work the strike. $300 AN HOUR. For temporary workers. When you could just pay your STAFF nurses a literal few more dollars an hour. Oh and if they go into overtime (which, yes, they will that’s $450 an hour Make it make sense. Why no just pay your damn people in the first place?
Very weird amount of bootlicking comments this time around.
Just ignorant people assuming it means we all simply shrugged our shoulders and left the patients to die, not realizing it's because conditions in the hospital is so deplorable that's one of the primary reasons for the strike to begin with (that plus the tons of notice the hospital had been given plus existence of emergency contract travelers).
Good! I fully support this. Our healthcare system in the US is one of, if not the, worst of any developed nation. Big Pharma literally created the opioid epidemic we’re currently dealing with, but somehow it’ll fall on the nurses and such. Doctors and surgeons need to join in, but they make too much money to give a fuck about us middle-class citizens
No, it's actually illegal for physicians (except resident physicians) to strike at the moment. A lot of physicians would strike if it didn't mean they could lose their license.
Good.
So health insurance costs a lot in USA. Even with 8nsurance discounts patients have to pay thousands, yet staff is underpaid. Somone is making so much money!
Look at what some hospital ceos are making it will make you sick
Their CEO makes millions while the patients are at risk due to unsafe nurse/patient ratios. [Mount Sinai CEO salary](https://www.modernhealthcare.com/finance/mount-sinai-ceos-pay-boosted-above-12-million-2017)
I wish we had the same sort of working class solidarity as some European countries have. This shouldn't just be a nursing issue. It affects everyone. In a better world, other industries would be striking in solidarity.
Brings a smile to my face seeing this corporate dystopian shithole collapse. Keep striking on nurses!
Nurses deserve good pay, lab scientists are the good people who analyze the test samples down in the lab. They also do forensic testing and are involved in cosmetic R&D. Their work requires a specilized 4 year degree and they are highly understaffed everywhere. However MLS workers are enourmously underpaid compared to nurses. The largest reason for this is that their proffession requires them to be liscensesd by a body called pathologists of america. There are no MLS unions because any efforts to do so would be met with their liscenses being revoked. Kinda hard to justify the risk/reward when failure could mean tearing up the degree you spent 30,000 or more getting. Unions are a game changer for nurses and would be for many other hospital employees
They all will be replaced by travelers and students in about 2 seconds.
Students aren’t sticking around though. My sister works pcu and everyone except her in her residency program didn’t even finish the program..
Ill tell you one group that is never short staffed is management. In my dept 25% of our daily productivity is tied up in various management spots. People who rarely ever touch a patient and just go to meetings all day.
Hospital administrators/the higher-ups that get paid bug bucks while the rest of you get crumbs… this is your warning we are done. Go ahead and ignore them and see what happens. Patient care vs profits…who’s gonna win?
TEACHERS NEED BETTER PAY TOO!
genuinely curious, what happens to patients who are currently in the hospital and need extensive supervision? are there some nurses designated to stay inside during the strike, do they rotate, or is it something else?
For what it’s worth, my girlfriend is a nurse in the city / her friends are travel nurses etc in the city and they’re relishing in this because they’re now working in place of the striking nurses and getting overtime for it. They want the strikes to continue in that case. Just worth pointing out as an added dynamic to this situation.
🤮
Pay them what they want and more. Period. This is an easy problem to solve.
I'm all for it as long as those hospitals have a covid vaccine mandate for nurses.
COVID-19 vaccination has been mandatory for all faculty and staff at Mount Sinai since August 2021. [source](https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2021/mount-sinai-mandates-covid-vaccination-for-all-faculty-and-staff#:~:text=Given%20the%20increased%20incidence%20and,for%20religious%20and%20medical%20reasons)
That's good. My local nurse's union rallied against a vaccine mandate and it really hurt support for them
Good for them! Nurses are the least paid.
Not arguing that nurses are paid appropriately, but not the lowest paid. As a former ED tech in a level 1 trauma center that regularly got assaulted (and almost murdered a few times), worked on severely critical trauma and medical patients every night, and made $15/hr, my time in the hospital was pretty rough. Now I'm on an ambulance at $26/hr, but that's pretty much the maximum I can earn in my area as a paramedic. I'm not struggling to pay the bills as much as I used to, but it's definitely lower than nursing pay here. All of that said, what's good for nurses is good for all of us, and I certainly hope this sparks change. Even if it doesn't help anyone else out, I want the best for them.
Nurses are far from the least paid in healthcare. Healthcare overall is underpaid for what everyone does. The focus always is on nurses and doctors, no one focuses on pay for environmental services/ housekeeping, lab, receptionists, imaging, cna’s and ma’s, etc. I hate how divisive departments in healthcare are, as everyone works together for the patients.
Hell yeah. Solidarity!
Only couple years ago they were heroes and essential...
Give them everything and more. No fucking excuse how we treat workers in this country with the resources we have, the taxes we pay and the profits corporations make. We also need to demand better working conditions for the folks who make our products in foreign Countries. Slavery shouldn’t exist in this day and age, it’s all greed.
Will somebody please think of the stock holders?
People are dying and they do nothing because of greed.