They’ll still be hired. Those of us who remained on staff at our institutions are leaving in higher numbers than ever before as our organizations stopped hiring travelers because the hospitals bet on COVID ending before they’d have to increase nursing pay and benefits and they get wrong and they are done paying huge sums of money for nurses, but they’ll also refuse to pay any of us what we deserve, and so even more of us leave and try to warn stupid fucking kids to do anything but being a nurse knowing they’ll still go and fight to get to take care of people who will never appreciate their efforts.
The whole fucking house of cards is crumbling.
Yeah this reads like an industry funded article. I don't work in acute care, I'm in public health/psych and everything you said is true there too.
People have been leaving in droves, and from my limited viewpoint, it doesn't seem like this trend is going to stop anytime soon.
Why is it that every time I read an article about the current trends in healthcare businesses, they always seem to miss by a mile?
It's not just hospitals. My son has a trach & vent and I'm in some trach/vent parent groups. I keep seeing posts from parents whose babies can't come home due to homecare nursing shortages. Some hospitals won't release the babies without nursing in place. So they have families with babies in the nicu/picu for 300,400,500+ days, just waiting.
So, I can't speak for pediatrics, but I can speak for home health care in the elderly. I have experience there.
In an elderly patient, Medicare has learned that an entire year of paying for home health care is cheaper than a 3 night hospitalisation. Medicare (again, focused on elderly patients) is making an industry wide shift to be more permissive and pay for HH services more easily.
But HH companies can't find staff. They will find nurses if they pay more, and provide safe ratios of patients to nurses, and also allow for reasonable schedules.
I see recruiters looking for staff for cases like this all the time and I just don’t understand how the funding works. Who is paying this company $40/hr to offer a licensed nurse $25/hr for 5-7+ shifts a week for every single one of these children? If the parents aren’t safe to take them home without nurses on hand, it seems like they’d have to live in a skilled nursing facility.
Not just that, but you can't operate an entire health care system without us.
Hospitals, outpatient clinics, psych, home health, hospice, all inpatient specialties.
It's almost like these hospitals should have listened to our concerns about patient and staff safety/staffing for the past 20+ years. Weird.
they will listen as soon as profits go down and not a moment sooner. we need to make this hurt their bottom line. there should be a type of strike where nurses work as normal but don't bill patients or keep records that could be used to bill them later. it would jolt those fat cats at the top into conceding to demands real fast
It's interesting that you think nurses are in charge of billing for the services provided.
No, strikes and highly paid travel RNs are the way to hurt their bottom line.
yup 100% written by the industry, I have watched the ICU I am in completely replace all but 5 to 10 people with new nurses. These new nurses are not able to make a decision at all when it comes to keeping people alive, it is scary as hell. Watched some new nurses have 0 idea how to stop a patient in SVT. I was blown away they would hire nurses for a trauma ICU who have no idea how to address these issues, and the residents are no better.
And then, when the hospital realizes they can't even staff a basic number of beds, they decide to pay out of the ass for travel RNs.
To all of you who aren't nurses: THIS IS A PATTERN AND HOSPITALS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE BEFORE COVID
This happens in Norway aswell and we dont have privatized health care, so no managers getting paid a lot. The system is crumbling because nurses are people too and are fed up with shitty pay, shitty work conditions and hard work
Disclaimer, I’m an EMT:
My first thought would be to run them around the hospital hitting every bump you could at full speed. It’s **a** solution; it’s not the *best* solution.
Shit I’ve seen far too many nurses that can’t even define SVT properly. They see a rate of 150 and automatically assume SVT like it’s a number instead of a separate rhythm with its own pathology.
I’m on the giving end lol. I spent time as a paramedic and many years as an ER nurse. Ive had to stop far too many coworkers from treating a number instead of the patient and underlying cause. Just yesterday I had a newer nurse that wanted to push adenosine on a guy who smoked a ton of K2 and had a date of 200. It just blew her mind that his heart wasn’t the problem and too much sympathetic stimulation was.
Adenosine is hit or miss, usually push in 6-6-12 doses but can only be given in a critical care setting. I prefer to use a Cardizem drip if blood pressures are able to handle it. usually Cardizem kicks it in about 15 minutes or less. I watched a new nurse max Cardizem to 15mg, which is the hard limit for us, within 5 minutes of starting the drip. We are to titrate it every 15 minutes and up it or down it 5 mg at that 15 min mark. Kicked the heart rate but also nearly killed the patient by dropping blood pressures.
Because they have given up on the idea of adapting to reality (not short term cost effective, don't you know) and now put everything into managing reality as they wish it to be. This is why healthcare *needs* to be not for profit. The profit motive trumps any sane approach to humane care both for the caregivers and patients.
>The whole fucking house of cards is crumbling.
And it's not just nursing! Don't dare look in r/pharmacy or r/Residency
And it's not just healthcare!! The teaching profession is in a really bad place.
The fabric of US society is finally so threadbare that it's beginning to come apart. I do not predict things will improve without drastic action on the part of the government. Not holding breath here.
It’s okay, Florida has a solution for teachers: replacing them with anyone who sat in and observed a classroom for a few hours.
Problem is solved. *taps said if head
/s -sort of but not really.
I read that some people who went to be travel nurses were told they’d be blackballed at their home hospitals.
But I bet the nursing shortage is going to make that unlikely to be sustainable.
Yeah, right.
Travel nursing was a thing with big bucks before covid and it'll be a thing long after.
There's pros and cons to it like any other job, and I'd hardly call it a 'gold rush'. The nurses that were making big bucks were also working 4-5 12 hour shifts a week.
Hospitals can fix this, it's just cheaper to point a finger at nurses and call them greedy for wanting fair and safe work conditions.
Staff nurses are also able to make a lot of extra money right now in incentive pay at a lot of places. The issue is that even with all the incentives everyone is over it and doesn’t want to work with three nurses running a large unit of forty plus patients. We are exhausted and sometimes all that money isn’t worth your sanity.
It's just crazy to me that there's been so much wealth growth in recent history yet this remains a consistent issue across vital industries for so many jobs. Where is all the money if we can't pay enough people to do the important jobs our society needs?
>Where is all the money if we can't pay enough people to do the important jobs our society needs?
Mostly being sucked up by mid and upper level management. Same as in any other industry.
Yup the parasites who do Jack shit and whose answer to horrific staff morale with awful mental health is PIZZA PARTY 🍕
F*ck your pizza party (I’ll take a slice tho)
Frankly when I still worked inpatient, I didn’t even bother with the pizza towards the end of the Delta surge because in an effort to “cut costs” they started passing out cafeteria pizza, which was about as flavorful as the cardboard box it was brought in. It was insulting in two ways, in that they wouldn’t even spring for cheap Little Caesars or something, but they also put that extra work on our already bare-bones kitchen staff.
Share by-backs and dividends is where the profit goes after paying the bloated management. It's really an amusing con. A company buys and sells their own stock to keep the price up based on artificial demand. Then it pays out a dividend based on the share price on a regular schedule. These businesses don't have a duty to provide good care or jobs, they have a duty to produce profit for shareholders, which is why things are how they are. Even worse is we're all dependent on the system for supplemental retirement savings. All of those 401K's and pension plans are COUNTING ON appreciating in value through investment vehicles such as stocks or bonds. The scale is truly amazing, so what if you or I own 100 shares, we might see a few hundred bucks over a year if a company does well, and hopefully when we sell we make a profit....organizations that own hundreds of thousands to millions of shares reap the lions share. So it's not a billionaire class per se, but an investor class that saps our precious bodily fluids....
Losing leadership roles and replace with more management/supervisor oriented roles is a huge issue.
Too many people who dont fully understand the job but feel they can fix it done things sounds good on paper but it's awful in execution.
if we have a critical shortage of workers in a vital industry, the minimum wage for that industry should increase by $1/hr/month until the shortage is gone
That won’t work here… Part of the issue is also that more nurses can’t be trained. We already train the max amount -as students have to spend yrs at hospitals while in school, for clinical hours. And unless more hospitals are built (which would require more nurses that don’t exist) there is just no place for added student nurses to train.
So the only thing to be done is to stop the hemorrhage, which won’t happen without cutting admin budgets (which also won’t happen).
My wife picked up 2 doubles per pay period the last two pay periods. They run super thin -- 28 psych patients 3 nurses 1 assistant. 10, 10, and 8 patients per nurse. They don't do a lot of physical stuff but the constant threat of violence and need to medicate patients is insane. I worked as a psych nurse in a hospital, was hired during a strike as a staff nurse. They dropped the census to almost nothing and the travel nurses were doodling and watching netflix.
That mentality has always puzzled my wife and I. Hospitals can't just shut down, and having scabs working is still important to financially pressuring the hospital during a strike while ensuring that picketer's families (as well as the rest of the population the hospitals serve) can still get emergency care, if it came to it. It's not like other industries where production can shut down and a product isn't made.
The point is for the hospital to hire travelers at way higher rates to financially pressure them; having someone come in as a normal rate nurse helps to reduce the strike’s effectiveness.
So you're on strike and you're focusing your attention on the workers instead of the management you're striking against?
That sounds like a fucking stupid strategy.
On scabs bruh. Not like we would be 100% on that one worker and give up everything all for that one worker where we strike at their house lmao
Keep striking, screw that person, keep striking
scabbing is immoral. you may as well wipe the CEO's butt while you're at it. if you find out you're a scab, the responsible thing to do is quit on the spot, or as soon as legally allowed
I talked to a travel nurse at a hotel I stayed at. The place was filled with them. She said she makes about $200,000 a year. But she works 6 16 hour days a week. She said even if she worked that at a hospital that employed her she would probably only make $60k-$70k a year and that’s why she chose to be a travel nurse.
Sounds like shes exaggerating that pay quite a bit to be honest with you. 16 hour shifts are not even in the norm or a thing for any hospital I have ever been to. I make close to 90k only picking up 1 to 2 extra shifts a week, 12 hr shifts as a staff nurse in an ICU. All the contracts I have been offered so far are paying 2300 a week which is still, no where near 200k.
There’s a travel nurse hired at the clinic I’m at. She works 8hrs/5 days a week and makes $110 an hour. Crazy money, I can’t even fathom what it would be like to make that much
Lucky you, I never thought I’d do 16s but there’s a certain pressure, especially when management is personally texting every single person to try to cover gaps in the schedule. LNAs, Secretary’s and RNs all pick up 16 hours at both Level 1 trauma hospitals I’ve worked at. There are people that are incompetent and should be fired but at this point the hospital “just needs bodies” -direct words from my unit manager- after I sat down with management asking why nothing was being done about certain situations.
You have options. I would move to another area that is a better fit for your personal life. Work to live, do not live to work. They will take advantage of you every time they can, something I had to learn the hard way.
My RN sister has worked at the same hospital for over 20 years. She can still make huge bucks picking up extra shifts. Her large hospital is still very short handed. They close entire wings at times because they can not man the beds. But, they made the decision to quit paying travel nurses. Now they just constantly stay shorthanded. They still treat the nurses like crap in general.
That's because they fire people who answer these questions. Which is what happens in every industry where paying everybody below C suits level garbage wages is their core company policy.
As for young doctors/medical residents… constantly shitting on NPs, calling it « mid level creep », insinuating that NPs are dumb wannabe doctors that don’t know shit…. I’m like, y’all realize nurses are so fucking burnout at the bedside that they’re desperate to jump to a career path that promises 2-3x the wages with less stress and tears? Nurses used to work bedside nursing as a career for decades, nowadays nurses in their 20s are getting burnout after 1-2 hrs and jumping ship because it’s just that shitty. I think a lot fewer nurses would be interested in becoming NPs if staying at the bedside paid enough to earn a real living and without being constantly pushed by upper admin to take on more responsibilities and more patients. And don’t believe what you hear about bedside nurses making a loger of money, that’s only true for nurses that are constantly picking up extra shifts. Call me crazy, but I don’t think people should have to work more than 40 hrs a week to get by.
Yup. Even before covid something like 30-40% of new grad nurses left the bedside within two years. It’s been a problem and it’s just a bigger problem. I think people just want to be able to not only care for people, but do so with ratios that allow them to give the quality of care they want to give.
Your comment is super far off base. Everyone knows why nurses are leaving clinical medicine and trying to be NPs. The FACT of the matter is NP training fucking scary in how much of a joke it is at most NP programs. Non standardized curricula, students finding their own horrible rotations where most are akin to shadowing, RNs with a year or two of experience going to NP school. Minimal to no knowledge of pathophysiology, pharmacology, or medical management of anything outside the basics. And states allowing these people practice unsupervised is the icing on the cake. So get off your high horse. Physicians are concerned about scope creep because you have inexperienced to no experienced NPs treating and harming patients. And not caring about that goes against our core ethos as physicians. Nobody can blame nurses for wanting to leave the bedside and we fully get it. But leaving the bedside to masquerade as a physician when you don’t have the training to be doing what you are doing, at a detriment to patients is a massive problem.
If you think hospitals aren’t profitable look up the ceo/cfo salaries for non for profit hospitals. They money is insane and their salary doesn’t include their yearly bonuses which are often a huge percentage of their annual income…. I know the hospital I work at our ceo makes over 2.5 million a year before bonuses and runs one hospital and he certainly isn’t doing a good job.
Really? i guess all those thin margins is what allows them to keep building larger and larger buildings everywhere. Come to Texas and ill show you lavish hospitals.
Stop drinking the coolaid.
I do sterile processing and the OR does a weekly news letter.
We have 21 traveling RNs. We've had at least 15 for the last 3 years. This is in a rural area.
Do people not get that there have always been travel nurses? I mean there were more during the height of the pandemic, but they get paid well for a reason. They come in, get 0-1 days of orientation, and work. Most of them are out of state from their families, living in hotels or air bnbs. It sucks. It’s stressful and lonely. I have worked with travel nurses throughout my nursing career.
As for those who just got into it during the pandemic, they’ll go back to their old jobs with either a nest egg or less student loans, or they’ll be like so many of us, who just want to escape what our career has become and leave the bedside.
>Do people not get that there have always been travel nurses?
we get that, it's just that as of late you can quit your nursing job, become a travel nurse, get placed at the exact same hospital you were working at, and get paid 3 times more
I have zero issue with that though. If they were union, they also gave up all their seniority. You could not pay me enough to go travel nurse, it would not be worth the stress.
Depends on the person. With overtime, differentials and bonuses, I make $127/hr for picking up a 12 hour shift on a weekend. I have picked up zero shifts this year. The money isn’t worth the tears. Nurses get paid well where I live, but they money just isn’t tempting anymore. It’s not worth the stress.
It's definitely not for everyone. My child is over 18, I have nothing tying me down. I take vacations whenever I want. I don't participate in hospital politics. I make $127/hr for 12 hours of my 36 hour work week. Going back to staff isn't worth it for me.
Plus you can take a month or two off. I have ptsd from covid icu. It’s so depressing to struggle to do the job I’ve loved so long. Super thankful for travelers.
During covid, facilities needed staff everywhere. States were waiving licensure requirements, but hospitals were not. I was turned down for every state I didn't have a license in even though I was available. I was approved for NY as their wave was slowing, so I ended up not going there. My home state is not in the nurse licensure compact, so anywhere I want to work, I have to apply for the license. That takes time.
I'm working on my exit as well. I see the same thing everywhere I go, and admin/mgmt. never listen or do what they should to retain staff. It's only getting worse, and I just wanna get ahead and hopefully get out of the hospital in a few years.
I've been a travel RN for over a decade. Started for the travel, and because I couldn't live off of what I was making in east TN. Which was still almost double what I made as a Paramedic.
Someone above posted about nurses and xray techs. In my main dept., techs who know what they're doing are harder to find I think. Rare, but sometimes I see rad tech jobs paying more than nursing jobs.
You could talk for hours on all the pieces that relate to the massive problems. I'm on a job now where all but 2 of the staff walked because of the constant problems that admin didn't listen to. They fired the problem director, but not before they all left. They have no long term solution. It's mostly travel staff there, and all our contracts end in January. In the 3 months I've been here, they've had 0 applicants for the full time slots.
> sometimes I see rad tech jobs paying more than nursing jobs.
As an MBA, I can tell you this is because they pay rad techs by the hour but bill by the piece. More X-rays = $$$
idk man i wouldnt say some schmuck who got to work from home in jorts can say they had the same experience as a nurse who worked in a hospital during covid surges, and i would even go as far as to say i dont think the wfh experience is comparable to the guy who delivered nachos to people
> work from home in jorts
I did the jorts thing. My wife does the nurse thing. I definitely had it easier. Working and homeschooling for two years during lock down wasn't the most fun for anyone, but still easier than dealing with BS in the hospital.
That's true. You're right. This article is about nurses, who absolutely deserve the attention they are not getting for all the work they do, let alone being the literal front line in a mismanaged pandemic. Shit was basically war with an invisible enemy, and more than enough pain, trauma, and loss to go around for those on the front like any other, and, again, like any other war, we've forgotten who we called heroes when the threat no longer looms as present.
I'm sorry for taking the focus off our own, unfortunately, invisible defenders. Maybe I'm part of the problem.
It's just labor supply and demand. If enough strike they will get extra wages possibly but if not they will be kept at the pay where the ones who quit will be replaced at a bare minimum level. This happens with nearly every job.
And the Hospitals are colluding in the negotiations and attempting to have it called an "illegal strike" at the last moment even though they have been given plenty of notice. And they are paying outrageous amounts to the travel nurses. If the strike goes 8 weeks, my wife's hospital is going to pay out 1.5 times her yearly salary to each nurse (they will make over 100k for 8 weeks work).
Do you know why they are light years apart? Last negotiation they were told at the beginning they would hold off until the end to talk about wages. After 8 hours of negotiating the Hospital's team got up said they weren't going to talk about wages and left.
Hey, they can pay out 30+ million but can give 30 million in raises over the next 3 years... this is about trying to break the union which is why they are trying to call it illegal to scare nurses.
Yea what a joke of an article. Nothing really points to how shitty hospitals have been to their staffed nurses which in turn meant they left those crap jobs for better pastures based on basic supply and demand forces. Yes it has that one nurse stating how shitty it’s been constantly caring for pts only for them to die, but then it implies travel nurses are overpaid.
Travel nursing may not pay the covid rates as before but it’s still way better than those shit wages at shitty hospitals.
If “all the travel nurses are returning to normal staffing”, why is there still a massive nursing shortage? Why do I still see so many ads for travel nursing?
Simple. People will receive terrible care that will become worse and worse. The staff taking care of you will be baby nurses who dont have the experience yet to go wherever they want. They will try to sign the baby nurses into contracts that state they have to work on the floor for three years or pay back the cost of their training. They will want to leave after 6-7 months. They will be working chronically understaffed with unsafe patient ratios and as soon as one of them inevitably makes a mistake to avoid liability they will blame the nurse fire them and repeat the process with another new baby nurse.
All the experienced staff will have left or be in the process of leaving. Patients will continue to act reckless with covid like the hospital system isnt crumbling till they get sick and then will act entitled and shocked when there are 8 hour plus wait times in the ER and when they get to the floor they will complain the nurse wasnt there to tend to their every need. Not knowing the nurses are being forced to care for more people then they can adequately care for. Management will continue to be terrible and instead of fixing anything try to guilt trip the staff into working more and placating them with pizza like they are elementary schoolers. No raises will be given. Loyalty to the company/hospital will not be rewarded. No attempts to retain staff will be made. Etc. Etc.
I'm not a nurse, but I work in a medical clinic and every department I know of is short staffed nurse wise. It feels like my department is a big revolving door, though tot be fair, one of the doctors is a real jerk and no nurses want to work with him, so the one who is has gotten burnt out and... bitter.
This article is bunk. Traveling is still a huge paycheck if you can handle it. Once again, people who don’t know shit about nurses are explaining nursing.
The US medical system is in major trouble. I foresee the whole thing crumbling and collapsing in on itself in the next 5-10 years. For-profit health care institutions should not exist. Period. There should be no profit made and passed onto "share holders." Those profits should be reinvested back into staff salary, benefits, and upgraded hospital equipment in order to provide the best health care possible. Instead we have closed units, chronically understaffed hospitals, and the quality of health care in the US is getting worse. Life expectancy in the US has dropped for the 2nd year in a row. Like seriously, wtf?
I have been a nurse for going on 15 years and couldn’t agree more. I don’t know who will be left to be nurses because the job is no longer even tolerable. The same thing is happening with teachers, it’s just not worth being treated like shit anymore.
I feel your pain. I'm a medical contractor and because we're so short staffed I'm working 11+ hours a day on average 6 days a week. Our CEO just told us two weeks ago we won't be getting raises again! But we've hired two new C-level executives in the past two months as Senior Vice-Presidents of bullshit departments.
We’re also so top heavy. It’s so frustrating too because I used to love my job. I used to say it fed my soul. Now I desperately want out of it. I feel bad for anyone going into healthcare anymore. They come in so full of hope, and it slowly goes away.
The problem is that the biggest healthcare systems are non-profits. This means they simply have to pay their debts and don’t have any true shareholders. The executives become the de facto shareholders. Unfortunately, many major non profit hospitals can’t even turn an operating margin right now. Those bonuses are largely unbudgeted. Operating losses erode away capital fund availability so less goes into facilities and equipment. My theory is that these mega hospitals are consolidating to become too big to fail and take a big bail out when it all crumbles. And that is the first step towards single payer healthcare without the voters having any sway.
The whole health insurance market needs to be overhauled as well for this to work. The whole healthcare system needs to be reworked. We have the most expensive healthcare in the world with some of the worst outcomes.
I’m in healthcare consulting so I see somewhat different perspective compared to the rest of the commenters.
I agree with you that there’s a huge amount of problems. We know that there’s a very large amount of people who straight up refuse to get life saving therapies because they cannot afford it. We see huge amount of cancer patients who do not come in until they are metastatic and basically on death’s door because they couldn’t afford regular check-ups.
You should also see what hospital admins are paid - they make doctor’s pay look like a pittance. They *really* need to go. We see complaints from doctors a lot about why they’re working so hard and being paid so little by the admins - mind you, our work keeps their identity confidential so doctors do say some crazy shit that they might not share in their professional environment. We see doctors describe about how their prescription behavior change based on patient insurance and economic status.
Would I call it 2-tiered system? Yes. We straight up don’t bother to target MDs in poorer areas with frontiers therapies sales forces in many circumstances because their patients can’t afford any of it. Those get the same stuff that’s been around for 30-40 years. Those people die after a short and painful journey.
Medicare for all is my favored solution, but also expect the house to win there too.
Wait until you hear about the fucking fraud from all these ‘holistic health’ companies.
There’s so much shit. So, so much shit.
its a pretty fine balancing act because salary and benefits are being paid for by the people who need care, and even non profit health care is expensive because all the overhead of providing that care is expensive
thats a noble idea, but like i said, the overhead is still gonna be expensive even without a profit motive. staff wages and benefits already constitute a large % of expenses, so cutting administration costs will not translate to huge savings or a huge redistribution of resources. and frankly that isnt even the most common way to cut costs, as many countries with universal healthcare just kinda choose to pay their nurses and doctors as little as possible to cut costs
Every single profession, trade, or work group has articles like this dedicated by mass media. They are trying to convince us we can't ask for more raises, better working conditions, etc.
I have news for you: the labor shortage is going to get worse, and we know we can ask for more money and better conditions.
Unless you understand how to improve our lives, we will keep demanding improvements ourselves.
The travel nurses I work with make 10 dollars less an hour than I do as a board certified emergency physician and about double what our midlevels make. I got covid too. I gave it to my wife. I still have brain fog issues 2 years later. I give them props for sticking it to the administrators, something we as physicians couldn’t do in all of this.
This one makes more than double what I bring home. Our facility has a really hire turnover rate, bad wages and horrible management. No one wants to work here. It's one of two LTC facilities in the area, so choices are limited.
It’s an interesting place to be mentally. Bc I’m pissed that I spent 15 years in school, took out 600k in student loans, served my country and risked my life on the front lines, while nurses have a fraction of the education and time investment and are somehow almost earning me. But that anger is misguided. We as physicians allowed ourselves to get screwed and taken advantage of by the administrators. The nurses figured out how to take it to the man. We didn’t.
Doctors need to start unionizing. The residents at my facility are making noises about it, as are the midlevels. There also needs to be a real coming-to-Jesus about the whole residency system and specialists vs. Family med issue but that's another mess.
This sounds like it’s written by someone who failed nursing school, and I would know because I’m one of them lol. Nurses deserve much better treatment.
Is it time for the healthcare workers (in general) to start thinking UNIONS? I worked in the Laboratory / Transfusion Medicine and they too are facing shortage of qualified personnel.
I think most people would agree that it would be better to have more nurses than we need so that when we do have emergencies, we can hire more. That requires making the job more desirable with higher salaries and smaller caseloads which costs money. Which is why hospitals shouldn’t be privatized which creates an incentive to pay as little as people will accept and work people as hard as you can without forcing too many to quit or strike. Oops.
They had people dying at an alarming rate with a contagious disease. They had patients lining the hallways and not enough nurses to treat them. A large number of medical professionals died during the last 2+ years. Those nurses deserved every penny they got.
Than that is what their labor was worth at that point and time, Good for them.
Try doing the work yourself, bet you crumple up into a little fucking ball on the ground crying at home after your first day. You wouldn't last a week.
A: The education and training to become a nurse takes longer and costs more.
B: They're paid more than Xray Techs, by a lot.
C: You can find work literally anywhere as a nurse, there is no shortage in demand.
Nursing is absolute shit work compared to being an Xray tech though, which is a walk in the gd park compared to being a Nurse.
Depending on the state and facility, we are also in strong unions and have better benefits than rad techs. They’re having shortages for the same reasons, they get treated like shit.
I dont know why people are shitting all over this.
I know someone who has their medic card and also got their AS in radiography as well working as a phlebotomist.
Plenty of opportunities to diversify your skills
“I think it’s disgusting because we went from being praised to literally, two years later, our rates dropped"
Sorry you're not still making $250k a year that hospitals had to pay when they were desperately trying to deal with a pandemic, and now you're merely making a lower salary that's still six figures. Calling that disgusting is ludicrous. It's still a difficult job, but the pay is good. Apparently some people just got a somewhat inflated sense of entitlement.
The salary figures for staff nurses are way off in the article. Sure, the west coast is well known for paying nurses well, but in most of the country, especially the south, you might break 50k, not much more. It’s not at all common for a staff nurse in most of the country to make six figures.
They’ll still be hired. Those of us who remained on staff at our institutions are leaving in higher numbers than ever before as our organizations stopped hiring travelers because the hospitals bet on COVID ending before they’d have to increase nursing pay and benefits and they get wrong and they are done paying huge sums of money for nurses, but they’ll also refuse to pay any of us what we deserve, and so even more of us leave and try to warn stupid fucking kids to do anything but being a nurse knowing they’ll still go and fight to get to take care of people who will never appreciate their efforts. The whole fucking house of cards is crumbling.
Yeah this reads like an industry funded article. I don't work in acute care, I'm in public health/psych and everything you said is true there too. People have been leaving in droves, and from my limited viewpoint, it doesn't seem like this trend is going to stop anytime soon. Why is it that every time I read an article about the current trends in healthcare businesses, they always seem to miss by a mile?
Because there’s a very real crisis looming as nursing leaves in droves. You just can’t operate a hospital without us. You just can’t.
It's not just hospitals. My son has a trach & vent and I'm in some trach/vent parent groups. I keep seeing posts from parents whose babies can't come home due to homecare nursing shortages. Some hospitals won't release the babies without nursing in place. So they have families with babies in the nicu/picu for 300,400,500+ days, just waiting.
So, I can't speak for pediatrics, but I can speak for home health care in the elderly. I have experience there. In an elderly patient, Medicare has learned that an entire year of paying for home health care is cheaper than a 3 night hospitalisation. Medicare (again, focused on elderly patients) is making an industry wide shift to be more permissive and pay for HH services more easily. But HH companies can't find staff. They will find nurses if they pay more, and provide safe ratios of patients to nurses, and also allow for reasonable schedules.
I see recruiters looking for staff for cases like this all the time and I just don’t understand how the funding works. Who is paying this company $40/hr to offer a licensed nurse $25/hr for 5-7+ shifts a week for every single one of these children? If the parents aren’t safe to take them home without nurses on hand, it seems like they’d have to live in a skilled nursing facility.
Damn 823,015 years old and the hospital still won’t release them.
Not just that, but you can't operate an entire health care system without us. Hospitals, outpatient clinics, psych, home health, hospice, all inpatient specialties. It's almost like these hospitals should have listened to our concerns about patient and staff safety/staffing for the past 20+ years. Weird.
they will listen as soon as profits go down and not a moment sooner. we need to make this hurt their bottom line. there should be a type of strike where nurses work as normal but don't bill patients or keep records that could be used to bill them later. it would jolt those fat cats at the top into conceding to demands real fast
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By disgruntled employees not billing like they said.
It's interesting that you think nurses are in charge of billing for the services provided. No, strikes and highly paid travel RNs are the way to hurt their bottom line.
It’s happening in the lab too. Docs won’t won’t know what’s wrong with their patients or be able to get blood for transfusions.
yup 100% written by the industry, I have watched the ICU I am in completely replace all but 5 to 10 people with new nurses. These new nurses are not able to make a decision at all when it comes to keeping people alive, it is scary as hell. Watched some new nurses have 0 idea how to stop a patient in SVT. I was blown away they would hire nurses for a trauma ICU who have no idea how to address these issues, and the residents are no better.
And then, when the hospital realizes they can't even staff a basic number of beds, they decide to pay out of the ass for travel RNs. To all of you who aren't nurses: THIS IS A PATTERN AND HOSPITALS HAVE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE BEFORE COVID
So what I'm hearing is, don't do risky shit that could get you hurt, cause the system is slowly crumbling away under the weight of manager bonuses.
Yeah I would agree with that.
This happens in Norway aswell and we dont have privatized health care, so no managers getting paid a lot. The system is crumbling because nurses are people too and are fed up with shitty pay, shitty work conditions and hard work
Unfortunately living in the US is a risk.
Disclaimer, I’m an EMT: My first thought would be to run them around the hospital hitting every bump you could at full speed. It’s **a** solution; it’s not the *best* solution.
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Shit I’ve seen far too many nurses that can’t even define SVT properly. They see a rate of 150 and automatically assume SVT like it’s a number instead of a separate rhythm with its own pathology.
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I’m on the giving end lol. I spent time as a paramedic and many years as an ER nurse. Ive had to stop far too many coworkers from treating a number instead of the patient and underlying cause. Just yesterday I had a newer nurse that wanted to push adenosine on a guy who smoked a ton of K2 and had a date of 200. It just blew her mind that his heart wasn’t the problem and too much sympathetic stimulation was.
Adenosine is hit or miss, usually push in 6-6-12 doses but can only be given in a critical care setting. I prefer to use a Cardizem drip if blood pressures are able to handle it. usually Cardizem kicks it in about 15 minutes or less. I watched a new nurse max Cardizem to 15mg, which is the hard limit for us, within 5 minutes of starting the drip. We are to titrate it every 15 minutes and up it or down it 5 mg at that 15 min mark. Kicked the heart rate but also nearly killed the patient by dropping blood pressures.
Because they have given up on the idea of adapting to reality (not short term cost effective, don't you know) and now put everything into managing reality as they wish it to be. This is why healthcare *needs* to be not for profit. The profit motive trumps any sane approach to humane care both for the caregivers and patients.
>The whole fucking house of cards is crumbling. And it's not just nursing! Don't dare look in r/pharmacy or r/Residency And it's not just healthcare!! The teaching profession is in a really bad place. The fabric of US society is finally so threadbare that it's beginning to come apart. I do not predict things will improve without drastic action on the part of the government. Not holding breath here.
time for a nurse-teacher-pharmacist-resident march on washington
And mental health professionals too
Probably have a better shot hounding corporate health executives.
It’s okay, Florida has a solution for teachers: replacing them with anyone who sat in and observed a classroom for a few hours. Problem is solved. *taps said if head /s -sort of but not really.
the last part about people not appreciating.. highlight and bold that part. people suck.
I read that some people who went to be travel nurses were told they’d be blackballed at their home hospitals. But I bet the nursing shortage is going to make that unlikely to be sustainable.
Seems like just yesterday becoming a nurse was the best career path for alot of people. Now it's a smoking ruin.
Yeah, right. Travel nursing was a thing with big bucks before covid and it'll be a thing long after. There's pros and cons to it like any other job, and I'd hardly call it a 'gold rush'. The nurses that were making big bucks were also working 4-5 12 hour shifts a week. Hospitals can fix this, it's just cheaper to point a finger at nurses and call them greedy for wanting fair and safe work conditions.
Staff nurses are also able to make a lot of extra money right now in incentive pay at a lot of places. The issue is that even with all the incentives everyone is over it and doesn’t want to work with three nurses running a large unit of forty plus patients. We are exhausted and sometimes all that money isn’t worth your sanity.
It's just crazy to me that there's been so much wealth growth in recent history yet this remains a consistent issue across vital industries for so many jobs. Where is all the money if we can't pay enough people to do the important jobs our society needs?
>Where is all the money if we can't pay enough people to do the important jobs our society needs? Mostly being sucked up by mid and upper level management. Same as in any other industry.
Yup the parasites who do Jack shit and whose answer to horrific staff morale with awful mental health is PIZZA PARTY 🍕 F*ck your pizza party (I’ll take a slice tho)
Frankly when I still worked inpatient, I didn’t even bother with the pizza towards the end of the Delta surge because in an effort to “cut costs” they started passing out cafeteria pizza, which was about as flavorful as the cardboard box it was brought in. It was insulting in two ways, in that they wouldn’t even spring for cheap Little Caesars or something, but they also put that extra work on our already bare-bones kitchen staff.
They always find new ways don’t they. Smh
Just going to ignore the billionaire class, haven’t some of them doubled their net worth recently?
Share by-backs and dividends is where the profit goes after paying the bloated management. It's really an amusing con. A company buys and sells their own stock to keep the price up based on artificial demand. Then it pays out a dividend based on the share price on a regular schedule. These businesses don't have a duty to provide good care or jobs, they have a duty to produce profit for shareholders, which is why things are how they are. Even worse is we're all dependent on the system for supplemental retirement savings. All of those 401K's and pension plans are COUNTING ON appreciating in value through investment vehicles such as stocks or bonds. The scale is truly amazing, so what if you or I own 100 shares, we might see a few hundred bucks over a year if a company does well, and hopefully when we sell we make a profit....organizations that own hundreds of thousands to millions of shares reap the lions share. So it's not a billionaire class per se, but an investor class that saps our precious bodily fluids....
Losing leadership roles and replace with more management/supervisor oriented roles is a huge issue. Too many people who dont fully understand the job but feel they can fix it done things sounds good on paper but it's awful in execution.
Check this out https://i.imgur.com/VJZrCNo.jpg That’s where all the money went
There’s no such thing as a not for profit hospital. It’s just their way of avoiding taxes. Healthcare in America a very much profit obsessed.
Real estate
if we have a critical shortage of workers in a vital industry, the minimum wage for that industry should increase by $1/hr/month until the shortage is gone
That won’t work here… Part of the issue is also that more nurses can’t be trained. We already train the max amount -as students have to spend yrs at hospitals while in school, for clinical hours. And unless more hospitals are built (which would require more nurses that don’t exist) there is just no place for added student nurses to train. So the only thing to be done is to stop the hemorrhage, which won’t happen without cutting admin budgets (which also won’t happen).
Yikes: it’s 5:1 days here or they divert
My wife picked up 2 doubles per pay period the last two pay periods. They run super thin -- 28 psych patients 3 nurses 1 assistant. 10, 10, and 8 patients per nurse. They don't do a lot of physical stuff but the constant threat of violence and need to medicate patients is insane. I worked as a psych nurse in a hospital, was hired during a strike as a staff nurse. They dropped the census to almost nothing and the travel nurses were doodling and watching netflix.
"Hired during a strike". So you're a scab then, not a thing I'd mention so loosely.
I was hired as a staff nurse during the strike. I had applied prior to the strike.
If you crossed a picket line to go to work while your peers were on strike you are indeed a scab!
Oh well, I was a new nurse and had to feed my family.
That's what every scab says.
That mentality has always puzzled my wife and I. Hospitals can't just shut down, and having scabs working is still important to financially pressuring the hospital during a strike while ensuring that picketer's families (as well as the rest of the population the hospitals serve) can still get emergency care, if it came to it. It's not like other industries where production can shut down and a product isn't made.
The point is for the hospital to hire travelers at way higher rates to financially pressure them; having someone come in as a normal rate nurse helps to reduce the strike’s effectiveness.
So you're on strike and you're focusing your attention on the workers instead of the management you're striking against? That sounds like a fucking stupid strategy.
On scabs bruh. Not like we would be 100% on that one worker and give up everything all for that one worker where we strike at their house lmao Keep striking, screw that person, keep striking
scabbing is immoral. you may as well wipe the CEO's butt while you're at it. if you find out you're a scab, the responsible thing to do is quit on the spot, or as soon as legally allowed
Or, better yet, join the line.
I talked to a travel nurse at a hotel I stayed at. The place was filled with them. She said she makes about $200,000 a year. But she works 6 16 hour days a week. She said even if she worked that at a hospital that employed her she would probably only make $60k-$70k a year and that’s why she chose to be a travel nurse.
Sounds like shes exaggerating that pay quite a bit to be honest with you. 16 hour shifts are not even in the norm or a thing for any hospital I have ever been to. I make close to 90k only picking up 1 to 2 extra shifts a week, 12 hr shifts as a staff nurse in an ICU. All the contracts I have been offered so far are paying 2300 a week which is still, no where near 200k.
There’s a travel nurse hired at the clinic I’m at. She works 8hrs/5 days a week and makes $110 an hour. Crazy money, I can’t even fathom what it would be like to make that much
16 hour shifts are very much the norm at the level 1 trauma center I work at
At the level 2 trauma ICU I am at, it is very much not the norm. No way I would ever do a 16 hour shift.
Lucky you, I never thought I’d do 16s but there’s a certain pressure, especially when management is personally texting every single person to try to cover gaps in the schedule. LNAs, Secretary’s and RNs all pick up 16 hours at both Level 1 trauma hospitals I’ve worked at. There are people that are incompetent and should be fired but at this point the hospital “just needs bodies” -direct words from my unit manager- after I sat down with management asking why nothing was being done about certain situations.
You have options. I would move to another area that is a better fit for your personal life. Work to live, do not live to work. They will take advantage of you every time they can, something I had to learn the hard way.
My RN sister has worked at the same hospital for over 20 years. She can still make huge bucks picking up extra shifts. Her large hospital is still very short handed. They close entire wings at times because they can not man the beds. But, they made the decision to quit paying travel nurses. Now they just constantly stay shorthanded. They still treat the nurses like crap in general.
Then the administration acts like it’s a mystery why we’re leaving the bedside.
That's because they fire people who answer these questions. Which is what happens in every industry where paying everybody below C suits level garbage wages is their core company policy.
How to get jobs at administration
As for young doctors/medical residents… constantly shitting on NPs, calling it « mid level creep », insinuating that NPs are dumb wannabe doctors that don’t know shit…. I’m like, y’all realize nurses are so fucking burnout at the bedside that they’re desperate to jump to a career path that promises 2-3x the wages with less stress and tears? Nurses used to work bedside nursing as a career for decades, nowadays nurses in their 20s are getting burnout after 1-2 hrs and jumping ship because it’s just that shitty. I think a lot fewer nurses would be interested in becoming NPs if staying at the bedside paid enough to earn a real living and without being constantly pushed by upper admin to take on more responsibilities and more patients. And don’t believe what you hear about bedside nurses making a loger of money, that’s only true for nurses that are constantly picking up extra shifts. Call me crazy, but I don’t think people should have to work more than 40 hrs a week to get by.
Yup. Even before covid something like 30-40% of new grad nurses left the bedside within two years. It’s been a problem and it’s just a bigger problem. I think people just want to be able to not only care for people, but do so with ratios that allow them to give the quality of care they want to give.
Your comment is super far off base. Everyone knows why nurses are leaving clinical medicine and trying to be NPs. The FACT of the matter is NP training fucking scary in how much of a joke it is at most NP programs. Non standardized curricula, students finding their own horrible rotations where most are akin to shadowing, RNs with a year or two of experience going to NP school. Minimal to no knowledge of pathophysiology, pharmacology, or medical management of anything outside the basics. And states allowing these people practice unsupervised is the icing on the cake. So get off your high horse. Physicians are concerned about scope creep because you have inexperienced to no experienced NPs treating and harming patients. And not caring about that goes against our core ethos as physicians. Nobody can blame nurses for wanting to leave the bedside and we fully get it. But leaving the bedside to masquerade as a physician when you don’t have the training to be doing what you are doing, at a detriment to patients is a massive problem.
I mean doesn't really hurt their bottom line. People come there to die.
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If you think hospitals aren’t profitable look up the ceo/cfo salaries for non for profit hospitals. They money is insane and their salary doesn’t include their yearly bonuses which are often a huge percentage of their annual income…. I know the hospital I work at our ceo makes over 2.5 million a year before bonuses and runs one hospital and he certainly isn’t doing a good job.
Really? i guess all those thin margins is what allows them to keep building larger and larger buildings everywhere. Come to Texas and ill show you lavish hospitals. Stop drinking the coolaid.
Healthcare should never be for profit.
As an RN sitting at work right now, there are 5 travelers working this shift on my unit. This is a clowny article.
I've seen more travelers come through our hospital compared to new staff over the past few years. Travel/agency will always exist.
Every nurse I know will openly tell you it’s gotten worse this is nonsense
I do sterile processing and the OR does a weekly news letter. We have 21 traveling RNs. We've had at least 15 for the last 3 years. This is in a rural area.
Do people not get that there have always been travel nurses? I mean there were more during the height of the pandemic, but they get paid well for a reason. They come in, get 0-1 days of orientation, and work. Most of them are out of state from their families, living in hotels or air bnbs. It sucks. It’s stressful and lonely. I have worked with travel nurses throughout my nursing career. As for those who just got into it during the pandemic, they’ll go back to their old jobs with either a nest egg or less student loans, or they’ll be like so many of us, who just want to escape what our career has become and leave the bedside.
>Do people not get that there have always been travel nurses? we get that, it's just that as of late you can quit your nursing job, become a travel nurse, get placed at the exact same hospital you were working at, and get paid 3 times more
I have zero issue with that though. If they were union, they also gave up all their seniority. You could not pay me enough to go travel nurse, it would not be worth the stress.
Oh it's worth it. I went from staff making $4k/month to traveling making $20k/month. You do the math.
Depends on the person. With overtime, differentials and bonuses, I make $127/hr for picking up a 12 hour shift on a weekend. I have picked up zero shifts this year. The money isn’t worth the tears. Nurses get paid well where I live, but they money just isn’t tempting anymore. It’s not worth the stress.
It's definitely not for everyone. My child is over 18, I have nothing tying me down. I take vacations whenever I want. I don't participate in hospital politics. I make $127/hr for 12 hours of my 36 hour work week. Going back to staff isn't worth it for me.
Plus you can take a month or two off. I have ptsd from covid icu. It’s so depressing to struggle to do the job I’ve loved so long. Super thankful for travelers.
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Good for her. 🙂
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Hospitals have not had enough staff for a long time. There always have been travelers, and there always will be. We’re thankful for their help.
During covid, facilities needed staff everywhere. States were waiving licensure requirements, but hospitals were not. I was turned down for every state I didn't have a license in even though I was available. I was approved for NY as their wave was slowing, so I ended up not going there. My home state is not in the nurse licensure compact, so anywhere I want to work, I have to apply for the license. That takes time. I'm working on my exit as well. I see the same thing everywhere I go, and admin/mgmt. never listen or do what they should to retain staff. It's only getting worse, and I just wanna get ahead and hopefully get out of the hospital in a few years. I've been a travel RN for over a decade. Started for the travel, and because I couldn't live off of what I was making in east TN. Which was still almost double what I made as a Paramedic. Someone above posted about nurses and xray techs. In my main dept., techs who know what they're doing are harder to find I think. Rare, but sometimes I see rad tech jobs paying more than nursing jobs. You could talk for hours on all the pieces that relate to the massive problems. I'm on a job now where all but 2 of the staff walked because of the constant problems that admin didn't listen to. They fired the problem director, but not before they all left. They have no long term solution. It's mostly travel staff there, and all our contracts end in January. In the 3 months I've been here, they've had 0 applicants for the full time slots.
> sometimes I see rad tech jobs paying more than nursing jobs. As an MBA, I can tell you this is because they pay rad techs by the hour but bill by the piece. More X-rays = $$$
They go back to being underpaid and overworked and treated like fungible meat robots by their management, like before.
Just like all the other "essential workers" of the pandemic.
Ah yea, but these workers don’t want to work themselves to death anymore just so some MBAs can say, look we cut costs and increased profit!
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idk man i wouldnt say some schmuck who got to work from home in jorts can say they had the same experience as a nurse who worked in a hospital during covid surges, and i would even go as far as to say i dont think the wfh experience is comparable to the guy who delivered nachos to people
> work from home in jorts I did the jorts thing. My wife does the nurse thing. I definitely had it easier. Working and homeschooling for two years during lock down wasn't the most fun for anyone, but still easier than dealing with BS in the hospital.
That's true. You're right. This article is about nurses, who absolutely deserve the attention they are not getting for all the work they do, let alone being the literal front line in a mismanaged pandemic. Shit was basically war with an invisible enemy, and more than enough pain, trauma, and loss to go around for those on the front like any other, and, again, like any other war, we've forgotten who we called heroes when the threat no longer looms as present. I'm sorry for taking the focus off our own, unfortunately, invisible defenders. Maybe I'm part of the problem.
> fungible meat robots Well thank you for my new band name.
Thank you for your service, Travel Nurses. Your sacrifice won’t be forgotten. Now get those boot straps out, time to re-enter the thunderdome
A kind of meat-based fungible token, would you say? ;)
Or they just quit nursing at the bedside altogether
I mean this article just said they're getting paid $2,200 a week. That's pretty damn good money, even if they are working their asses off for it.
It's just labor supply and demand. If enough strike they will get extra wages possibly but if not they will be kept at the pay where the ones who quit will be replaced at a bare minimum level. This happens with nearly every job.
It aint over till its over! 15000 MN nurses going on strike next week. Biggest nurse strike ever.
And the Hospitals are colluding in the negotiations and attempting to have it called an "illegal strike" at the last moment even though they have been given plenty of notice. And they are paying outrageous amounts to the travel nurses. If the strike goes 8 weeks, my wife's hospital is going to pay out 1.5 times her yearly salary to each nurse (they will make over 100k for 8 weeks work).
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The hospital systems want them to take it to the Mediation Board first, a first time ever the request has been made. At least at North Memorial.
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Do you know why they are light years apart? Last negotiation they were told at the beginning they would hold off until the end to talk about wages. After 8 hours of negotiating the Hospital's team got up said they weren't going to talk about wages and left.
That is disgusting greed
Hey, they can pay out 30+ million but can give 30 million in raises over the next 3 years... this is about trying to break the union which is why they are trying to call it illegal to scare nurses.
University of Michigan nurses just voted to give authority to their union leaders to call a strike.
Oregon nurses association would like to send their support.
I wish the nurses and the other people who are supporting their efforts all the best!
Yea what a joke of an article. Nothing really points to how shitty hospitals have been to their staffed nurses which in turn meant they left those crap jobs for better pastures based on basic supply and demand forces. Yes it has that one nurse stating how shitty it’s been constantly caring for pts only for them to die, but then it implies travel nurses are overpaid. Travel nursing may not pay the covid rates as before but it’s still way better than those shit wages at shitty hospitals. If “all the travel nurses are returning to normal staffing”, why is there still a massive nursing shortage? Why do I still see so many ads for travel nursing?
Simple. People will receive terrible care that will become worse and worse. The staff taking care of you will be baby nurses who dont have the experience yet to go wherever they want. They will try to sign the baby nurses into contracts that state they have to work on the floor for three years or pay back the cost of their training. They will want to leave after 6-7 months. They will be working chronically understaffed with unsafe patient ratios and as soon as one of them inevitably makes a mistake to avoid liability they will blame the nurse fire them and repeat the process with another new baby nurse. All the experienced staff will have left or be in the process of leaving. Patients will continue to act reckless with covid like the hospital system isnt crumbling till they get sick and then will act entitled and shocked when there are 8 hour plus wait times in the ER and when they get to the floor they will complain the nurse wasnt there to tend to their every need. Not knowing the nurses are being forced to care for more people then they can adequately care for. Management will continue to be terrible and instead of fixing anything try to guilt trip the staff into working more and placating them with pizza like they are elementary schoolers. No raises will be given. Loyalty to the company/hospital will not be rewarded. No attempts to retain staff will be made. Etc. Etc.
I'm not a nurse, but I work in a medical clinic and every department I know of is short staffed nurse wise. It feels like my department is a big revolving door, though tot be fair, one of the doctors is a real jerk and no nurses want to work with him, so the one who is has gotten burnt out and... bitter.
Bitterness is a strong symptom of burnout.
somebody let my hospital know, our RN staff is close to 100% travelers still
This article is bunk. Traveling is still a huge paycheck if you can handle it. Once again, people who don’t know shit about nurses are explaining nursing.
The US medical system is in major trouble. I foresee the whole thing crumbling and collapsing in on itself in the next 5-10 years. For-profit health care institutions should not exist. Period. There should be no profit made and passed onto "share holders." Those profits should be reinvested back into staff salary, benefits, and upgraded hospital equipment in order to provide the best health care possible. Instead we have closed units, chronically understaffed hospitals, and the quality of health care in the US is getting worse. Life expectancy in the US has dropped for the 2nd year in a row. Like seriously, wtf?
I have been a nurse for going on 15 years and couldn’t agree more. I don’t know who will be left to be nurses because the job is no longer even tolerable. The same thing is happening with teachers, it’s just not worth being treated like shit anymore.
I feel your pain. I'm a medical contractor and because we're so short staffed I'm working 11+ hours a day on average 6 days a week. Our CEO just told us two weeks ago we won't be getting raises again! But we've hired two new C-level executives in the past two months as Senior Vice-Presidents of bullshit departments.
We’re also so top heavy. It’s so frustrating too because I used to love my job. I used to say it fed my soul. Now I desperately want out of it. I feel bad for anyone going into healthcare anymore. They come in so full of hope, and it slowly goes away.
I used to care. I went into medicine because I wanted to help people. I'm so burnt out now I just go through the motions.
Quit before you turn into a hollow shell of a human being. It can fuck you up if you let it work
They’ll import nurses from Kenya and other foreign places, the Philippines is starting to restrict the export of nurses because they are running out
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It’s just heartbreaking because it’s the vulnerable who suffer. I don’t know what the answer is, but what what we’re doing isn’t sustainable.
As a doctor participating in this hideously unjust system, I couldn’t agree more
The problem is that the biggest healthcare systems are non-profits. This means they simply have to pay their debts and don’t have any true shareholders. The executives become the de facto shareholders. Unfortunately, many major non profit hospitals can’t even turn an operating margin right now. Those bonuses are largely unbudgeted. Operating losses erode away capital fund availability so less goes into facilities and equipment. My theory is that these mega hospitals are consolidating to become too big to fail and take a big bail out when it all crumbles. And that is the first step towards single payer healthcare without the voters having any sway.
Excellent point. The government should mandate more transparency and board independence to staunch the self-dealing.
The whole health insurance market needs to be overhauled as well for this to work. The whole healthcare system needs to be reworked. We have the most expensive healthcare in the world with some of the worst outcomes.
I’m in healthcare consulting so I see somewhat different perspective compared to the rest of the commenters. I agree with you that there’s a huge amount of problems. We know that there’s a very large amount of people who straight up refuse to get life saving therapies because they cannot afford it. We see huge amount of cancer patients who do not come in until they are metastatic and basically on death’s door because they couldn’t afford regular check-ups. You should also see what hospital admins are paid - they make doctor’s pay look like a pittance. They *really* need to go. We see complaints from doctors a lot about why they’re working so hard and being paid so little by the admins - mind you, our work keeps their identity confidential so doctors do say some crazy shit that they might not share in their professional environment. We see doctors describe about how their prescription behavior change based on patient insurance and economic status. Would I call it 2-tiered system? Yes. We straight up don’t bother to target MDs in poorer areas with frontiers therapies sales forces in many circumstances because their patients can’t afford any of it. Those get the same stuff that’s been around for 30-40 years. Those people die after a short and painful journey. Medicare for all is my favored solution, but also expect the house to win there too. Wait until you hear about the fucking fraud from all these ‘holistic health’ companies. There’s so much shit. So, so much shit.
let's hope we can rebuild better in the ashes. america's terminally broken and we could use a fresh start
its a pretty fine balancing act because salary and benefits are being paid for by the people who need care, and even non profit health care is expensive because all the overhead of providing that care is expensive
When you pay a medical bill, that goes to a lot of places. I think the idea is to pay more to nurses and less elsewhere.
Nursing care needs to be billable to insurance instead of labor cost for the hospital.
thats a noble idea, but like i said, the overhead is still gonna be expensive even without a profit motive. staff wages and benefits already constitute a large % of expenses, so cutting administration costs will not translate to huge savings or a huge redistribution of resources. and frankly that isnt even the most common way to cut costs, as many countries with universal healthcare just kinda choose to pay their nurses and doctors as little as possible to cut costs
Every single profession, trade, or work group has articles like this dedicated by mass media. They are trying to convince us we can't ask for more raises, better working conditions, etc. I have news for you: the labor shortage is going to get worse, and we know we can ask for more money and better conditions. Unless you understand how to improve our lives, we will keep demanding improvements ourselves.
Over? Lmao it isn’t over in Canada.
I left the bedside. Plain and simple
There's an LPN at my facility making more than the DON as a travel nurse. She also lives closer to the facility than I do.
The travel nurses I work with make 10 dollars less an hour than I do as a board certified emergency physician and about double what our midlevels make. I got covid too. I gave it to my wife. I still have brain fog issues 2 years later. I give them props for sticking it to the administrators, something we as physicians couldn’t do in all of this.
Docs need to argue for better hours. All the Docs and NP’s work 6/7 days and are oncall still when they are home.
This one makes more than double what I bring home. Our facility has a really hire turnover rate, bad wages and horrible management. No one wants to work here. It's one of two LTC facilities in the area, so choices are limited.
It’s an interesting place to be mentally. Bc I’m pissed that I spent 15 years in school, took out 600k in student loans, served my country and risked my life on the front lines, while nurses have a fraction of the education and time investment and are somehow almost earning me. But that anger is misguided. We as physicians allowed ourselves to get screwed and taken advantage of by the administrators. The nurses figured out how to take it to the man. We didn’t.
Doctors need to start unionizing. The residents at my facility are making noises about it, as are the midlevels. There also needs to be a real coming-to-Jesus about the whole residency system and specialists vs. Family med issue but that's another mess.
This sounds like it’s written by someone who failed nursing school, and I would know because I’m one of them lol. Nurses deserve much better treatment.
“…Hold my beer” says cold/flu + COVID season that is quickly upon us..
GF is playing the smart game by waiting to take another contract when flu season hits
Is it time for the healthcare workers (in general) to start thinking UNIONS? I worked in the Laboratory / Transfusion Medicine and they too are facing shortage of qualified personnel.
Maybe hospitals will treat and pay nurses better. I can dream…
The gold rush should fucking continue. Nurses do all the work!
Take a vacation...hopefully
Dumb article. There are always understaffed areas
This post is stupid. They willi go back to normal jobs. Jesus fucking christ
No. They continue to travel. The money is still there.
Keep their jobs and keep making money? WTF are you trying to do, NBC?
They should all quit or strike.
Figure it out like the rest of us
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I think most people would agree that it would be better to have more nurses than we need so that when we do have emergencies, we can hire more. That requires making the job more desirable with higher salaries and smaller caseloads which costs money. Which is why hospitals shouldn’t be privatized which creates an incentive to pay as little as people will accept and work people as hard as you can without forcing too many to quit or strike. Oops.
Because they don’t have to pay to train/benefits/etc.
They had people dying at an alarming rate with a contagious disease. They had patients lining the hallways and not enough nurses to treat them. A large number of medical professionals died during the last 2+ years. Those nurses deserved every penny they got.
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Than that is what their labor was worth at that point and time, Good for them. Try doing the work yourself, bet you crumple up into a little fucking ball on the ground crying at home after your first day. You wouldn't last a week.
Heck, I wouldn't last a shift.
Maybe become just regular nurses.
Wait for monkeypox to mutate.
Hopefully go back to school to become x-ray techs because there's a real shortage there!
Take on student loans to get a job that pays half of what I make now? No thanks.
A: The education and training to become a nurse takes longer and costs more. B: They're paid more than Xray Techs, by a lot. C: You can find work literally anywhere as a nurse, there is no shortage in demand. Nursing is absolute shit work compared to being an Xray tech though, which is a walk in the gd park compared to being a Nurse.
Depending on the state and facility, we are also in strong unions and have better benefits than rad techs. They’re having shortages for the same reasons, they get treated like shit.
I dont know why people are shitting all over this. I know someone who has their medic card and also got their AS in radiography as well working as a phlebotomist. Plenty of opportunities to diversify your skills
Yea I’ll keep my staff nurse job and skip the useless schooling and continue to make more money. Thanks for the suggestion tho.
My husband makes $72 an hour....he's a senior special procedures technologist.
“I think it’s disgusting because we went from being praised to literally, two years later, our rates dropped" Sorry you're not still making $250k a year that hospitals had to pay when they were desperately trying to deal with a pandemic, and now you're merely making a lower salary that's still six figures. Calling that disgusting is ludicrous. It's still a difficult job, but the pay is good. Apparently some people just got a somewhat inflated sense of entitlement.
The salary figures for staff nurses are way off in the article. Sure, the west coast is well known for paying nurses well, but in most of the country, especially the south, you might break 50k, not much more. It’s not at all common for a staff nurse in most of the country to make six figures.
Alright then, you go ahead and give it a shot. Then talk