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Doctors and Nurses Are Running on Empty

124 points by kungfudoi 6y ago

Der_Einzige 6y ago
On the upside, traveling nurses are now routinely making 5-10K a week (and they usually get real PPE rather than be told to reuse stuff) That's far better money than most soldiers (or even FAANG engineers) make, and the risk of being shot or having to write crappy unit tests is far smaller. Source if you don't believe me: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/covid-nurses-big-money-wellness-khn-partner/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/covid-nurses-big-money... Lmao what's wrong downvoters? Don't like being told that nurses are making more than you?
- chowells 6y ago
  I don't care how much someone other than me makes. I care that you're so insensitive that when you're told that medical professionals are burning out en mass you think money makes up for it. That's so incredibly lacking in both empathy (they're human beings) and utility (they're medical care providers) that I can't reconcile it with any good-faith viewpoint on the world. So I have to assume it's trolling and should not be amplified.
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Money absolutely makes up for it. I used the soldier example because we as a society have decided that their PTSD and other burn-out is compensated by medical-care, and the money / benefits that the military pays you. One usually knows the serious risks of developing PTSD from being a soldier before entering. We do the same for Police Officers, and it's for these reasons that cops end up so well paid in many places. The medical field is similar. We pay them more as a way to compensate them for the utility they bring to the world despite the risks associated with their job. If I am lacking in empathy, than so is the rest of the world, and my particular instance of this "lack of empathy" is tiny compared to others. If anything, we should celebrate that market forces are giving mistreated nurses a way out. I think that if anything, we should be very happy that market forces are giving disgruntled nurses a way to stick the finger to their shitty hospital management ("Oh, you won't let me have new PPE? Fu*k you I quit and I'm taking a job that pays 10x as much...")
    - alistairSH 6y ago
      But with both the soldier and the doctor/nurse, there is an expected status quo for work vs compensation. A soldier is aware that the US has been a state of low-level conflict, with sporadic bursts of intensity, since 9/11 (or before). Even in a state of peace, there are dangerous deployments (anecdotally, almost every retired Marine I know has some sort of permanent injury from training - most are of the annoying variety - surgically repaired knees - but some are worse). A pandemic the likes of which we haven't seen for a century is a change in that status quo for medical providers. It also brings a level of work and stress that simply isn't sustainable, regardless of compensation. A human simply can't sustain 80 hour weeks, no matter how much we pay them. Nobody wants to be stressed out all day long because their patients are being even more moronic than normal (see also: South Dakota nurses who deal with COVID-deniers who are literally dying of COVID).
  - UShouldBWorking 6y ago
    He said, "on the upside". In no way did he detract from the work they are doing. I also don't get the downvoted.
    - acdha 6y ago
      It’s not a useful contribution: overwork is always a problem and especially important in healthcare where it’s not “our project launches late” but “someone died due to error or lack of attention”. It’s also misrepresenting the few who can travel with the much larger group who can’t take those gigs - especially important when you consider what life is like for anyone with kids right now. Put in HN terms, do your 80 hour weeks get better if you learn that some consultants are temporarily billing $500/hour?
      - pb7 6y ago
        Nurses get paid hourly in most(?) places including generous overtime. Most professions get frequently overworked with little extra for that increase. Do you feel just as bad publicly for those folks as you do for nurses?
        acdha 6y ago
        As it happens I do but that's also irrelevant: you aren't required to sort the list of problems in descending order and ignore everything but the first one. In the context of a conversation about nurses, it doesn't add anything to start “what about!” tangents.
        zaroth 6y ago
        What they’re paid is not irrelevant. There was basically a nationwide discussion on providing hazard pay to nurses at the onset of all this. Solving the pay issue doesn’t mean the other issues don’t exist, but it is definitely important and noteworthy progress.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      It's getting downvoted because it comes off as "Yeah, but..." which absolutely detracts.
  - woahAcademia 6y ago
    This is a self created problem by using regulatory capture. Sure the human is tired, but the profession is greedy.
  - sonotathrowaway 6y ago
    I think a lot of the anti-mask crowd uses a lot of arguments rooted in sociopathy and the assumption that people should only care about themselves: “it only kills the old”, “it’s only a problem if you have a preexisting condition”, “the nurses are making more money anyway”, “we need to sacrifice some people for the economy”, etc.
    - Der_Einzige 6y ago
      Please do not misconstrue me or my ideas as being part of or sympathetic to the "anti-mask" crowd or as an endorsement of sociopathic thinking. The "crappy unit tests" part was an attempt at humor which I expected more people to get around here.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    Some jobs are hard and extremely strenuous. The least we can do is pay very well for them and make sure that anyone doing the job is well informed of the risks, is a consenting adult, is making the choice freely and not under coercion like threat of being fired. Very good pay is absolutely an “upside”. The personal and emotional attacks against OP are totally unwarranted.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - supercanuck 6y ago
      What you are interpreting as personal/emotional attacks, are people shocked and responding to OP's lack of empathy and disregard for human beings and our hospitals being staffed with overworked emotionally drained people, which affects us all but the OP is shifting the focus to, well at least some workers are making 10,000 more. I mean, I guess some people just need that spelled out to them due to their lack of ability to empathize.
      - zaroth 6y ago
        That’s not what OP said. “I care that you're so insensitive that...” is not taking the most generous interpretation of OP’s comment and is absolutely a personal attack. It is not conducive to productive discussion. Nurses are being paid more. We can feel free to make an argument for why that doesn’t matter without personal insults.
        supercanuck 6y ago
        That may not be what OP said directly but by prioritizing pay and following it up with Lmao what's wrong downvoters? Don't like being told that nurses are making more than you? ... that is certainly what OP communicated!
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    Well you did amplify it by commenting on it... I don't really get why the other comment was so bad though. And it sounds like you're saying a better thing to do is just quietly feel empathy and express some vague generic words of acknowledgement. Which will inevitably be followed by promptly forgetting about it and going back to our normal lives, like 99% of us reading this thread will do. What good does that really do? And what harm does it really do to discuss/debate different aspects of this situation, and learn more details about what's going on?
- bluedino 6y ago
  The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT. They are desperate.
  - u801e 6y ago
    > The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT. I think it's more along the lines that it's probably cheaper to pay you time and a half given hospital IT pay compared to paying qualified nursing staff to do the same.
    - bluedino 6y ago
      I'm not qualified to do anything 'medical', this is all stuff they would have CNA's do for as cheap as possible.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Most roles aren't the kind making that money. A few making big money does not make up for what's happening to the rest. And travel roles are weird/tough in other ways too.
  - woahAcademia 6y ago
    Physicians do.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think physicians are very much the minority of healthcare providers. I think it's one physician per many nurse, CNA, PT, OT, ST, etc. Specifically because docs are so expensive.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    I've got a nurse friend with significant autoimmune issues who can't quit her job because she needs the health insurance - she works in the ER of a rural hospital in the Midwest making ~$45k/year. She's absolutely inundated with Covid patients right now and is risking her life every minute that she spends there. Some random traveling medical professionals making good money in no way absolves the rest of the country's apathy toward this scourge.
    - gwright 6y ago
      Nothing to do with nursing per-se, but de-coupling employment from health insurance would be a good thing. I realize that there are lots of other complicated issues with regard to health care and health insurance but I can't think of any other service that is so tightly coupled to your employer. Some reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/
      - mikeyouse 6y ago
        Yep, 100% agree. If you've ever worked in a small organization (~50 employees), it's amazing how much money, time and energy is spend on health insurance. Every single HR person in the country needs to be an expert on these esoteric insurance edges or you get taken for a ride and your employees and balance sheet suffer.
- yokaze 6y ago
  I think your comment sounds a bit belittling to the work and hardships the nurses have to endure for the payment. In my book it is rather adequate. I'm not sure how to relate having people die on you while being apart from your family to writing unit tests. It may be not intended to sound that way
- duxup 6y ago
  >On the upside, traveling nurses are now routinely making 5-10K a week That's an upside? That some folks are making more money? While others are seriously ill, die / can't see family and etc?
- jfim 6y ago
  > are now routinely making 5-10K a week [...] That's far better money than most soldiers (or even FAANG engineers) make That's not an unusual amount of money to make at L5 after a few years, and unlike the traveling nurse position, it's not temporary. That being said, I'm glad to see hospitals competing on actual worker safety, hopefully this will encourage hospitals to have sustainable stocks of PPE in the future.
  - meragrin_ 6y ago
    L5?
    - lucasmullens 6y ago
      Likely referring to "level 5" at Google: http://levels.fyi/ http://levels.fyi/
- dragontamer 6y ago
  I come from a largely nursing-based family. Yes, the choice of going into nursing is largely a strategic choice, much like other life-long decisions (going to high school, going to college, getting a house. going into nursing, etc. etc.). In fact, a huge part of the calculus is knowing that US Citizenship is offered to nurses at higher rates (due to the nursing shortage). Ironically: being a doctor is not a strategic choice despite making more money. You need to sacrifice another 10-years of your life in school and additional training, and going into virtually any other field will result in more money in most situations. Especially if you become a general practitioner: the most needed doctor (but the one that is paid the least). Run the numbers of 10-fewer years of 401k savings in your youngest years as a 20-year old... as you go through additional schooling + residency. There's not a lot of money to be had here. -------- So you have a point: money, citizenship, and more are offered to nurses and doctors. Because the roles are important and a lot of people (fortunately) agree that the role is important. But that's not really how nurses / doctors think on the day-to-day level. They usually are thinking "Patient X doesn't listen to me. X would be in a better situation if they did Y". Doctors / nurses can easily make more money by selling unnecessary prescriptions / unnecessary surgery / etc. etc. That's just the position of trust that they're in. The fact that they usually DONT do that is due to a sense of duty and Hippocratic oath. Doctors / nurses, if placed in a "pragmatic capitalist" setting, aren't to be trusted actually. Its due to culture and soft-reasons (a sense of duty. A sense of morals, a sense of ethics) that they remain ethical. Not all doctors/nurses are ethical. But the vast, vast majority of them are ethical. Seeing things in a "greedy pure capitalist" way in the profession is grossly frowned upon. Because most people don't really see doctors / nurses as an adversary offering health services. A doctor / nurse is someone who is there to help you when you need help.
- gruez 6y ago
  >or having to write crappy unit tests is far smaller. don't know about you, but I'd much rather write crappy unit tests than be exposed to infectious patients 8 hours a day.
orev 6y ago
Archive link: https://archive.is/v5916 https://archive.is/v5916
bzb6 6y ago
...food, review!
tootahe45 6y ago
Nobody is forcing them to work. My guess is that being massively overpaid for what they do makes it worth it for them, otherwise we would've seen mass walkouts.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  It's a symptom of our time that everything gets reduced to an economic calculus. The concepts of sacrifice, passion, or duty seem like a distant memory. Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying it's doctors and nurses thinking this way. But a lot of posters on HN certainly are.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    It’s just reality. If you want more people to sign up to change bedpans during a pandemic, then pay up. The cause of stress among healthcare providers is economic, and so is the solution. I would never advise my kids to go into a job where a part of your pay is being called a hero. That’s how you get taken advantage of. This is not wartime. This is a result of MBAs in management running the organization so lean that there is no slack in the system. So you can go ahead and offer your passion, duty, and sacrifice, but someone above you is just going to see it as another place they can save money.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      The labor force isn't a frictionless system. If we decided to double nurse's pay worldwide right now, how long do you think it would take until we have more nurses?
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I’m sure it takes years for a nurse to learn the ins and outs of the job, but my point is if they were paid well historically, then more people would have become nurses. And perhaps less trained people like CNA’s can be trained in a few months to start assisting nurses? But it has to begin with incentivizing them with proper pay. Relying on people’s charity to do their duty in lieu of competitive pay is not a good strategy.
woahAcademia 6y ago
After spending billions of dollars on lobbying to corner the market Physicians and hospital workers are tired. I'm sure they sleep fine in their multi million dollar homes. My best solution is to create a Science based healthcare alternative as competition to current Authority based healthcare system. Regarding COVID, Do we really need someone to spend 14 years to learn to put a ventilator in? Or can we teach this 1 specific job in 1500 hours of training? Can we teach people how to use oxygen as almost 90% of patients don't need anything beyond oxygen?
- djsumdog 6y ago
  ventilators are highly specialized, and they're death sentences. A lot of people early on died due to the overuse of vents. Today they're not used until needed and the recovery rates have gone up.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
For anyone reading this that may be a major donor or board member at a hospital: Proactively ensure that your staff, from the food court contractors, to top surgeons have comfortable pay, support, time off, insurance, and supplies or the ones you need won't be there when you need them the most for a variety of reasons.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nine_zeros 6y ago
Why are degree requirements so high for nurses? What's with this artificially imposed supply shortage?
- watwut 6y ago
  What do you think nurses do?
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  Because in most cases it's not going to be a doctor saving your life, it's going to be a nurse. They need to have the knowledge and skills to do so.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  They aren't! Nursing is one of very few licensed professions you can do with an associates degree. And that 2 years is PACKED with a ton of need-to-know skills. The field requires rather incredible breadth just for an entry level position. It's a very demanding program. These are people dealing with the possibility of life and death mistakes constantly without immediate supervision so a licensure is totally appropriate. I'm frankly bewildered at your question. It suggests extreme unfamiliarity with the required nursing skill-set. I was a paramedic, which took me 3 full-time semesters and also required a licensure to practice. And while we had to do a few things outside of the nursing scope, we probably only really covered maybe 1/3 of the skills and knowledge that nurses need to cover in 4 semesters.
  - nine_zeros 6y ago
    There is a skillset required for nursing. But those skills can be taught. They are taught. What's stopping us from teaching them en-masse?
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      The skills required to be a nuclear physicist can be taught, but that doesn't mean that they can be taught to anyone, regardless of aptitude. And nursing, in practice, requires more than just a specific set of trainable intellectual skills, it also requires physical and social skills and aptitudes,for which proficiency is less correlated with those for intellectual skills than it is across intellectual skills. And nursing (viewed broadly) skills are taught in mass, the nursing series of professions employs a huge number of people. RNs alone account for more than 1% of the entire US population, adding CNAs and LPN/LVNs, that goes up to a little under 2%.
n0us 6y ago
Man, this thread really bringing out the worst of Hackernews and its so disappointing but unfortunately not surprising to see the complete lack of capacity for empathy from some of the other heavily downvoted commenters. Almost everyone who participates on this site is well educated and fortunate enough to understand that people have been putting their lives on the line for months on end to help people through this crisis. They did not sign up for this an in most cases probably don't really have a choice but to keep working. Health care has always been known as a high stress field, but the last year has completely changed everything even for the people not directly working with Covid patients. Hospitals in America continue to treat employees horrendously while the executives hide out and rake in the big bucks. Maybe a small minority of nurses are earning this "5-10k" but there are probably not as many as you would think. Not everyone can just leave home and everything else behind and work 5-12s in a week.
- jorblumesea 6y ago
  HN users are generally well compensated and largely disconnected from the trials and tribulations of many healthcare workers and normal people. Tech is a bubble in many ways. The disconnect between tech, tech salaries and "how the other half lives" has always shocked me. People who have never worked in a restaurant legitimately questioning why waiters need to make a living wage and why they don't just join a coding bootcamp.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- liveoneggs 6y ago
  yeah it's easy to see from these comments how theranos got funded
  - jonsno56 6y ago
    And juicero. “But it makes economic sense!!”
- troughway 6y ago
dragontamer 6y ago
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. And with 2020 shaking up to be one of the "worst years" in history, it is important to remember what we can truly be thankful for. Tomorrow, give a moment to thank the hard working nurses and doctors who have done what they can to save as many lives as possible in this year. That's what Thanksgiving is all about: even in the worst of times, we need to give thanks to the people who made this year just a little bit less shitty than it could have been. That's absolutely something to be thankful for. For the 80-hour weeks, for the endless stress, for the worry of contracting COVID19 and spreading it to the ones they love. The frontline workers: be they paramedics, doctors, or nurses, have put in extra effort this year. Their work is usually seen in a negative light (# of deaths), because its impossible to see the converse (# of lives saved).
- jtbayly 6y ago
  >with 2020 shaking up to be one of the "worst years" in history... Really? No. Not even one of the worst in living memory.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    Those downvoting me really need to read more history.
    - watwut 6y ago
      People on HN tend to think that Pancer General teaches you about motivations of German WWII commanders. Or that 300 is actually history of Sparta. I am not even joking here, those are literally apparently upvoted comments I seen.
  - gruez 6y ago
    Right? I'm thinking ww2/ww1/spanish flu must be much worse? Wikipedia says covid-19 killed around 1.4M so far, but the spanish flu killed between 17-11 million.
akeck 6y ago
PTSD in healthcare workers is going to be a silent secondary "pandemic" for years to come.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
I've got a friend who's a nurse in a local hospital. She's in the OB ward but has a half dozen patients on her floor with Covid. She says at least half is on antianxiety meds (xanax); she just got a talking-to from her doc who refused to refill her prescription. Apparently, the first bottle is available for anyone with the connections, but after that they start talking about addiction and asking questions. They are offering extra pay; they are understaffed with positions open for RNs at $50/hr plus a 30% bonus (not sure why that's not just $65). About 40% of the staff has or has had COVID.
- jamie_ca 6y ago
  Cynical take: 30% bonus is there for retention. If you don't stick around for the year to hit the bonus, that's salary they don't need to pay you.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    That’s not cynical, that’s the purpose of a bonus. To ensure retention until the bonus is paid, and if you don’t stick around until the payout date, then you don’t get a bonus. You also stagger the bonus accrual and the payout time so that when the bonus is paid, they are halfway to accruing next year’s bonus so if they want to leave, they have to contemplate giving up a half year’s worth of bonus.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      And to add, sometimes a new employer will pay out that “lost” bonus if they really want you. In my case, I was 3/4 into a 1yr retention bonus, and the new employer (which usually doesn’t do retention bonuses) agreed to give me the same bonus after staying for a year. Not exactly the same thing, but trying to encourage people to consider jobs even if they’re part-way into one of these retention arrangements. It was a ~$10k return for a few hours of negotiation. But I was prepared to walk away if I didn’t get it.
- op03 6y ago
  Immigration flood gates will be opened to solve this just as they did for Y2K.
renewiltord 6y ago
I'll do it. Lots of the things they can do can be outsourced to a cheaper less-trained individual. I know because the sleep deprivation means half of them are working at the capacity of a drunk version of me. The number of mistakes surgical assistants make that surgeons have to watch out for is quite something. Veteran surgeons like my parents have top notch surgical teams they've cultivated over time. But most surgeries aren't performed by veterans. American society is unable to use versatile individuals because it is advanced: sophisticated power structures have powerful propaganda arms that block efficient utilization. Many things in life have transferable skills. Big parts about being a Registered Nurse are just being meticulous and memorizing large quantities of information: both things people like me are exceptional at. And my tolerance for risk is high. I'd smokejump if you needed me, I'd work on COVID patients if you needed me. With my own PPE if you so desire. But you won't. Because let's be honest, there are those who want to preserve the order for their own reasons, those who want to live in interesting times, and those who fear change.
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  Thanks. But you are not scalable. You know what is? An entire society taking this thing seriously.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    There are many like me. I'd wager in the tens of thousands willing and able. If we'd started in March, you'd have had us trained by now. If you start reservist wildfire training me now, I'll be ready by next season. Certification fetishism is ruining America's agility. Unsurprising. All societies switch from exploration to exploitation to preservation at some point until they are replaced by a new disruptor. It happened to Britain. It's happening to America.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      > If we'd started in March In March, I was trying to convince my family that COVID19 even existed. We did start in March. Discussing that COVID19 is real, that masks help, and that pooling health care resources was needed for the imminent future. Fortunately, my local area is doing good on stockpiling PPE, expanding hospital beds / resources and more. The issue is that a good chunk of America decided that COVID19 was a fake virus that only afflicted China, no wait, only affected Europe... no wait... only affected liberal cities. There was no way for it to spread around the country. Sad fact: its too late to change the nursing situation now. Your state is either ready for this, or it isn't. Too late to change things. You had since January to prepare (when China announced to the world the COVID19 issue), maybe March (when New York City announced to the country that COVID19 arrived on our shores). What we can do is start the propaganda campaigns needed to get mass vaccinations ready.
bigbubba 6y ago
If their industry didn't artificially restrict the supply of labor to keep their wages sky high, they wouldn't be so overworked now that more is required of them. My sympathy is nonexistent; they've made out like bandits for years and now they're paying the price for that (unfortunately, that's a price that must be paid by the rest of us too.) I hope they begin to take this as a wakeup call. To the downvoters, let me ask you this: how many Americans have been driven into medical bankruptcy while their doctors are living in multi-million dollar McMansions? The system in America is the way doctors have designed it. They have outsized political power; legislators heed their lobbyists. They created and perpetuated this system so they could profit from it. They have been hoisted by their own petard.
- nishantk 6y ago
  you're blaming ground-level individual doctors and nurses for administrative and systematic industry failures. In a heavily regulated and specialized industry where mobility is more limited.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Doctor run hospitals aren't any cheaper. Collectively, doctors control the regulation and administration of their own industry. The AMA is one of the largest lobbyists in America. They have incredible political influence.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    No, this guy is actually correct. The supply of medical doctors is kept artificially low in order to keep salaries artificially high. I ran into this firsthand. I was actually a pre-med student in college, but as I really dug into how the whole system works and found out that physicians' groups and lobbies work to prevent new medical schools from being established, to keep spots in existing medical schools scarce, to keep their salaries inflated, I got disgusted and instead finished my degree in biological sciences with a focus in evolutionary biology. The system needs an enormous overhaul and reform. There are some workarounds being implemented to address demand, notably nurse practitioners, who have almost the same powers and privileges as M.D.s, but not quite. That's even changing though. But the core of OP's post is totally correct. A huge part of this situation we find ourselves in right now is due to good old-fashioned greed and protectionism.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Anecdote time. My GF is an OT, burnt out as hell, and pushing through it. Walking away means just not being paid for a while, because the options are either 1) go to a different facility, which wouldn't make anything better because the whole industry is struggling with covid, or 2) go to a job outside the industry, which means reskilling or making unskilled wages with a bachelor's+master's sized mountain of student loan debt, or 3) just quitting and burning through savings for a while. Before covid, it was already an abusive job. She doesn't quit a job that is super abusive because it feels like abandoning patients. Her employers take advantage of that. And then the world goes "thanks docs and nurses" and then the rest of the industry on the front lines is like, yeah I guess we're invisible. And if her wages did go up, everyone would just gripe about how abusive it is that healthcare (a human right!) costs so much. She puts up with so much horrible shit, working so much harder than I do for so much less, because her patients really, really matter to her. If you judge healthcare workers for walking out, understand that they're dealing with tremendous pressure and abuse. If you judge healthcare workers for not walking out, like they're just getting what's coming, reaping what they sow, understand that they do this for reasons that aren't just money, and be thankful that they are willing to give more than they get. They're burning out helping people. Have empathy.
- wolco2 6y ago
  Burned out nurses and nurse feeling guilty and covering up for admin cost cutting doesn't help anyone. From a nurse prespective it's a difficult choice and without a safety net people are forced into these choices. There is no easy answer now. I would not know what to tell them.
908B64B197 6y ago
For years they enabled the AMA to cap residency spots and created an artificial scarcity & drive prices up. Now they are whining that they are a scarce resource?
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I see the downvotes but no explanations!
  - fairity 6y ago
    People who run high on empathy generally think those that who don't feel empathy are bad people. Based on your comment, they are assuming you don't feel empathy. And, downvoting you is their way of settling their negative judgment.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      Making healthcare a scarce resource isn't empathic either.
      - fairity 6y ago
        True but besides the point. They want a more forthright expression of empathy. If you simply prefaced your comment with “I really feel for our frontline workers.” they’d upvote you instead.
        908B64B197 6y ago
        so it would be better to say: I really feel for our frontline workers. But for years they enabled the AMA to cap residency spots and created an artificial scarcity that drove prices of healthcare up. Now they are whining that they are a scarce resource? And they, using the money they acquired by leveraging their scarcity, even bought a submarine piece of PR to buy sympathy from the public so that they don't try to figure out why exactly they are so scarce! But again, I really feel for our front-line workers. If only there was a way to have more of them yet budgeting the same amount for healthcare. Yeah, that does sound better.
michaniskin 6y ago
It's just a job. Nobody is being forced to go to work. If you don't like your job, or if you can't do your job, you can quit and get another job. This is America. As long as people are griping and complaining instead of quitting we know we're in good shape.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > Nobody is being forced to go to work. Your patients will die if you don't go to work. You're not "forced" to go in. But there's a strong sense of duty here. Its life-or-death. Nurses / doctors chose this profession because they want to save lives.
  - michaniskin 6y ago
    Sure, there are pros and cons to going to work. That's why it's called work. Every job has them.
- skim_milk 6y ago
  This is one part of the problem though, I know someone in the hospital staffing industry and they have 28,000 open positions in America for skilled nursing alone even with the huge pay increases. Just hope you don't get sick in the next year. And besides, the job tree has stopped bearing its fruit because it is out of season and it's been picked dry already.
  - michaniskin 6y ago
    So prices will go up. That's how we get other people to voluntarily do things for us. I don't see a problem there.
- kristjansson 6y ago
  Sure, but the terminal point of that logic is _an exodus of healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic_. Seems like something to avoid?
  - 6y ago
engineer_22 6y ago
I'm sure some of these folks could really use a break. But we need them! So please remember next time you're in a healthcare setting to treat your providers and nurses with dignity and respect! Then we need to start talking, as a nation, what our goals are for our healthcare industry and what we're willing to set aside to achieve those goals. Clearly we were not prepared for this pandemic, maybe we need to make some structural changes. Tertiary question, would Obamacare have alleviated this situation?
- djsumdog 6y ago
  The same should be said of police officers as well.
m0llusk 6y ago
This might be an opportunity to trigger rethinking of how we handle some of our labor pools. Stress is extreme with the medical sector now, but there are signs of similar related stresses in other sectors also. Construction, Education, and Software Engineering all site high labor costs and low labor availability. At the same time the number of adults of prime working age looking for work and not finding it is at record highs as is the number of frustrated working age people that have left the labor pool. If we had more onramps into these generally lauded labor markets then there might be greater flexibility and humanity in responses to stress, especially really serious stresses such as we see now. Make it possible to get limited training for some kind of assistant position and people can gain experience and potentially move up the ladder or simply serve as useful fodder that insulate better trained and more experienced workers from the worst stresses. Instead potential workers are eliminated early on by requirements that are often old and limited in proven relevance. And apart from all that there are cultural limitations. It isn't some weird mistake or detailed physical evaluation that keeps female participation in construction at extreme lows and male participation in education of the young similarly low. There are serious social barriers involved. Up till now we have had the luxury of setting up expensive many years long training gateways and arbitrary cultural barriers with these fields, but this isn't necessarily rational and forces limitations which are contributing to dangerous overload.

124 points by kungfudoi 6y ago

On the upside, traveling nurses are now routinely making 5-10K a week (and they usually get real PPE rather than be told to reuse stuff) That's far better money than most soldiers (or even FAANG engineers) make, and the risk of being shot or having to write crappy unit tests is far smaller. Source if you don't believe me: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/covid-nurses-big-money-wellness-khn-partner/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/covid-nurses-big-money... Lmao what's wrong downvoters? Don't like being told that nurses are making more than you?

chowells 6y ago
I don't care how much someone other than me makes. I care that you're so insensitive that when you're told that medical professionals are burning out en mass you think money makes up for it. That's so incredibly lacking in both empathy (they're human beings) and utility (they're medical care providers) that I can't reconcile it with any good-faith viewpoint on the world. So I have to assume it's trolling and should not be amplified.
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  Money absolutely makes up for it. I used the soldier example because we as a society have decided that their PTSD and other burn-out is compensated by medical-care, and the money / benefits that the military pays you. One usually knows the serious risks of developing PTSD from being a soldier before entering. We do the same for Police Officers, and it's for these reasons that cops end up so well paid in many places. The medical field is similar. We pay them more as a way to compensate them for the utility they bring to the world despite the risks associated with their job. If I am lacking in empathy, than so is the rest of the world, and my particular instance of this "lack of empathy" is tiny compared to others. If anything, we should celebrate that market forces are giving mistreated nurses a way out. I think that if anything, we should be very happy that market forces are giving disgruntled nurses a way to stick the finger to their shitty hospital management ("Oh, you won't let me have new PPE? Fu*k you I quit and I'm taking a job that pays 10x as much...")
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    But with both the soldier and the doctor/nurse, there is an expected status quo for work vs compensation. A soldier is aware that the US has been a state of low-level conflict, with sporadic bursts of intensity, since 9/11 (or before). Even in a state of peace, there are dangerous deployments (anecdotally, almost every retired Marine I know has some sort of permanent injury from training - most are of the annoying variety - surgically repaired knees - but some are worse). A pandemic the likes of which we haven't seen for a century is a change in that status quo for medical providers. It also brings a level of work and stress that simply isn't sustainable, regardless of compensation. A human simply can't sustain 80 hour weeks, no matter how much we pay them. Nobody wants to be stressed out all day long because their patients are being even more moronic than normal (see also: South Dakota nurses who deal with COVID-deniers who are literally dying of COVID).
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  He said, "on the upside". In no way did he detract from the work they are doing. I also don't get the downvoted.
  - acdha 6y ago
    It’s not a useful contribution: overwork is always a problem and especially important in healthcare where it’s not “our project launches late” but “someone died due to error or lack of attention”. It’s also misrepresenting the few who can travel with the much larger group who can’t take those gigs - especially important when you consider what life is like for anyone with kids right now. Put in HN terms, do your 80 hour weeks get better if you learn that some consultants are temporarily billing $500/hour?
    - pb7 6y ago
      Nurses get paid hourly in most(?) places including generous overtime. Most professions get frequently overworked with little extra for that increase. Do you feel just as bad publicly for those folks as you do for nurses?
      - acdha 6y ago
        As it happens I do but that's also irrelevant: you aren't required to sort the list of problems in descending order and ignore everything but the first one. In the context of a conversation about nurses, it doesn't add anything to start “what about!” tangents.
        zaroth 6y ago
        What they’re paid is not irrelevant. There was basically a nationwide discussion on providing hazard pay to nurses at the onset of all this. Solving the pay issue doesn’t mean the other issues don’t exist, but it is definitely important and noteworthy progress.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    It's getting downvoted because it comes off as "Yeah, but..." which absolutely detracts.
- woahAcademia 6y ago
  This is a self created problem by using regulatory capture. Sure the human is tired, but the profession is greedy.
- sonotathrowaway 6y ago
  I think a lot of the anti-mask crowd uses a lot of arguments rooted in sociopathy and the assumption that people should only care about themselves: “it only kills the old”, “it’s only a problem if you have a preexisting condition”, “the nurses are making more money anyway”, “we need to sacrifice some people for the economy”, etc.
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Please do not misconstrue me or my ideas as being part of or sympathetic to the "anti-mask" crowd or as an endorsement of sociopathic thinking. The "crappy unit tests" part was an attempt at humor which I expected more people to get around here.
- zaroth 6y ago
  Some jobs are hard and extremely strenuous. The least we can do is pay very well for them and make sure that anyone doing the job is well informed of the risks, is a consenting adult, is making the choice freely and not under coercion like threat of being fired. Very good pay is absolutely an “upside”. The personal and emotional attacks against OP are totally unwarranted.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - supercanuck 6y ago
    What you are interpreting as personal/emotional attacks, are people shocked and responding to OP's lack of empathy and disregard for human beings and our hospitals being staffed with overworked emotionally drained people, which affects us all but the OP is shifting the focus to, well at least some workers are making 10,000 more. I mean, I guess some people just need that spelled out to them due to their lack of ability to empathize.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      That’s not what OP said. “I care that you're so insensitive that...” is not taking the most generous interpretation of OP’s comment and is absolutely a personal attack. It is not conducive to productive discussion. Nurses are being paid more. We can feel free to make an argument for why that doesn’t matter without personal insults.
      - supercanuck 6y ago
        That may not be what OP said directly but by prioritizing pay and following it up with Lmao what's wrong downvoters? Don't like being told that nurses are making more than you? ... that is certainly what OP communicated!
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Well you did amplify it by commenting on it... I don't really get why the other comment was so bad though. And it sounds like you're saying a better thing to do is just quietly feel empathy and express some vague generic words of acknowledgement. Which will inevitably be followed by promptly forgetting about it and going back to our normal lives, like 99% of us reading this thread will do. What good does that really do? And what harm does it really do to discuss/debate different aspects of this situation, and learn more details about what's going on?
bluedino 6y ago
The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT. They are desperate.
- u801e 6y ago
  > The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT. I think it's more along the lines that it's probably cheaper to pay you time and a half given hospital IT pay compared to paying qualified nursing staff to do the same.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    I'm not qualified to do anything 'medical', this is all stuff they would have CNA's do for as cheap as possible.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Most roles aren't the kind making that money. A few making big money does not make up for what's happening to the rest. And travel roles are weird/tough in other ways too.
- woahAcademia 6y ago
  Physicians do.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think physicians are very much the minority of healthcare providers. I think it's one physician per many nurse, CNA, PT, OT, ST, etc. Specifically because docs are so expensive.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  I've got a nurse friend with significant autoimmune issues who can't quit her job because she needs the health insurance - she works in the ER of a rural hospital in the Midwest making ~$45k/year. She's absolutely inundated with Covid patients right now and is risking her life every minute that she spends there. Some random traveling medical professionals making good money in no way absolves the rest of the country's apathy toward this scourge.
  - gwright 6y ago
    Nothing to do with nursing per-se, but de-coupling employment from health insurance would be a good thing. I realize that there are lots of other complicated issues with regard to health care and health insurance but I can't think of any other service that is so tightly coupled to your employer. Some reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      Yep, 100% agree. If you've ever worked in a small organization (~50 employees), it's amazing how much money, time and energy is spend on health insurance. Every single HR person in the country needs to be an expert on these esoteric insurance edges or you get taken for a ride and your employees and balance sheet suffer.
yokaze 6y ago
I think your comment sounds a bit belittling to the work and hardships the nurses have to endure for the payment. In my book it is rather adequate. I'm not sure how to relate having people die on you while being apart from your family to writing unit tests. It may be not intended to sound that way
duxup 6y ago
>On the upside, traveling nurses are now routinely making 5-10K a week That's an upside? That some folks are making more money? While others are seriously ill, die / can't see family and etc?
jfim 6y ago
> are now routinely making 5-10K a week [...] That's far better money than most soldiers (or even FAANG engineers) make That's not an unusual amount of money to make at L5 after a few years, and unlike the traveling nurse position, it's not temporary. That being said, I'm glad to see hospitals competing on actual worker safety, hopefully this will encourage hospitals to have sustainable stocks of PPE in the future.
- meragrin_ 6y ago
  L5?
  - lucasmullens 6y ago
    Likely referring to "level 5" at Google: http://levels.fyi/ http://levels.fyi/
dragontamer 6y ago
I come from a largely nursing-based family. Yes, the choice of going into nursing is largely a strategic choice, much like other life-long decisions (going to high school, going to college, getting a house. going into nursing, etc. etc.). In fact, a huge part of the calculus is knowing that US Citizenship is offered to nurses at higher rates (due to the nursing shortage). Ironically: being a doctor is not a strategic choice despite making more money. You need to sacrifice another 10-years of your life in school and additional training, and going into virtually any other field will result in more money in most situations. Especially if you become a general practitioner: the most needed doctor (but the one that is paid the least). Run the numbers of 10-fewer years of 401k savings in your youngest years as a 20-year old... as you go through additional schooling + residency. There's not a lot of money to be had here. -------- So you have a point: money, citizenship, and more are offered to nurses and doctors. Because the roles are important and a lot of people (fortunately) agree that the role is important. But that's not really how nurses / doctors think on the day-to-day level. They usually are thinking "Patient X doesn't listen to me. X would be in a better situation if they did Y". Doctors / nurses can easily make more money by selling unnecessary prescriptions / unnecessary surgery / etc. etc. That's just the position of trust that they're in. The fact that they usually DONT do that is due to a sense of duty and Hippocratic oath. Doctors / nurses, if placed in a "pragmatic capitalist" setting, aren't to be trusted actually. Its due to culture and soft-reasons (a sense of duty. A sense of morals, a sense of ethics) that they remain ethical. Not all doctors/nurses are ethical. But the vast, vast majority of them are ethical. Seeing things in a "greedy pure capitalist" way in the profession is grossly frowned upon. Because most people don't really see doctors / nurses as an adversary offering health services. A doctor / nurse is someone who is there to help you when you need help.
gruez 6y ago
>or having to write crappy unit tests is far smaller. don't know about you, but I'd much rather write crappy unit tests than be exposed to infectious patients 8 hours a day.

orev 6y ago

Archive link: https://archive.is/v5916 https://archive.is/v5916

bzb6 6y ago

...food, review!

tootahe45 6y ago

Nobody is forcing them to work. My guess is that being massively overpaid for what they do makes it worth it for them, otherwise we would've seen mass walkouts.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AlexandrB 6y ago
It's a symptom of our time that everything gets reduced to an economic calculus. The concepts of sacrifice, passion, or duty seem like a distant memory. Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying it's doctors and nurses thinking this way. But a lot of posters on HN certainly are.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  It’s just reality. If you want more people to sign up to change bedpans during a pandemic, then pay up. The cause of stress among healthcare providers is economic, and so is the solution. I would never advise my kids to go into a job where a part of your pay is being called a hero. That’s how you get taken advantage of. This is not wartime. This is a result of MBAs in management running the organization so lean that there is no slack in the system. So you can go ahead and offer your passion, duty, and sacrifice, but someone above you is just going to see it as another place they can save money.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    The labor force isn't a frictionless system. If we decided to double nurse's pay worldwide right now, how long do you think it would take until we have more nurses?
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      I’m sure it takes years for a nurse to learn the ins and outs of the job, but my point is if they were paid well historically, then more people would have become nurses. And perhaps less trained people like CNA’s can be trained in a few months to start assisting nurses? But it has to begin with incentivizing them with proper pay. Relying on people’s charity to do their duty in lieu of competitive pay is not a good strategy.

woahAcademia 6y ago

After spending billions of dollars on lobbying to corner the market Physicians and hospital workers are tired. I'm sure they sleep fine in their multi million dollar homes. My best solution is to create a Science based healthcare alternative as competition to current Authority based healthcare system. Regarding COVID, Do we really need someone to spend 14 years to learn to put a ventilator in? Or can we teach this 1 specific job in 1500 hours of training? Can we teach people how to use oxygen as almost 90% of patients don't need anything beyond oxygen?

djsumdog 6y ago
ventilators are highly specialized, and they're death sentences. A lot of people early on died due to the overuse of vents. Today they're not used until needed and the recovery rates have gone up.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago

For anyone reading this that may be a major donor or board member at a hospital: Proactively ensure that your staff, from the food court contractors, to top surgeons have comfortable pay, support, time off, insurance, and supplies or the ones you need won't be there when you need them the most for a variety of reasons.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nine_zeros 6y ago

Why are degree requirements so high for nurses? What's with this artificially imposed supply shortage?

watwut 6y ago
What do you think nurses do?
vinceguidry 6y ago
Because in most cases it's not going to be a doctor saving your life, it's going to be a nurse. They need to have the knowledge and skills to do so.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
They aren't! Nursing is one of very few licensed professions you can do with an associates degree. And that 2 years is PACKED with a ton of need-to-know skills. The field requires rather incredible breadth just for an entry level position. It's a very demanding program. These are people dealing with the possibility of life and death mistakes constantly without immediate supervision so a licensure is totally appropriate. I'm frankly bewildered at your question. It suggests extreme unfamiliarity with the required nursing skill-set. I was a paramedic, which took me 3 full-time semesters and also required a licensure to practice. And while we had to do a few things outside of the nursing scope, we probably only really covered maybe 1/3 of the skills and knowledge that nurses need to cover in 4 semesters.
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  There is a skillset required for nursing. But those skills can be taught. They are taught. What's stopping us from teaching them en-masse?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    The skills required to be a nuclear physicist can be taught, but that doesn't mean that they can be taught to anyone, regardless of aptitude. And nursing, in practice, requires more than just a specific set of trainable intellectual skills, it also requires physical and social skills and aptitudes,for which proficiency is less correlated with those for intellectual skills than it is across intellectual skills. And nursing (viewed broadly) skills are taught in mass, the nursing series of professions employs a huge number of people. RNs alone account for more than 1% of the entire US population, adding CNAs and LPN/LVNs, that goes up to a little under 2%.

n0us 6y ago

Man, this thread really bringing out the worst of Hackernews and its so disappointing but unfortunately not surprising to see the complete lack of capacity for empathy from some of the other heavily downvoted commenters. Almost everyone who participates on this site is well educated and fortunate enough to understand that people have been putting their lives on the line for months on end to help people through this crisis. They did not sign up for this an in most cases probably don't really have a choice but to keep working. Health care has always been known as a high stress field, but the last year has completely changed everything even for the people not directly working with Covid patients. Hospitals in America continue to treat employees horrendously while the executives hide out and rake in the big bucks. Maybe a small minority of nurses are earning this "5-10k" but there are probably not as many as you would think. Not everyone can just leave home and everything else behind and work 5-12s in a week.

jorblumesea 6y ago
HN users are generally well compensated and largely disconnected from the trials and tribulations of many healthcare workers and normal people. Tech is a bubble in many ways. The disconnect between tech, tech salaries and "how the other half lives" has always shocked me. People who have never worked in a restaurant legitimately questioning why waiters need to make a living wage and why they don't just join a coding bootcamp.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
liveoneggs 6y ago
yeah it's easy to see from these comments how theranos got funded
- jonsno56 6y ago
  And juicero. “But it makes economic sense!!”
troughway 6y ago

dragontamer 6y ago

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. And with 2020 shaking up to be one of the "worst years" in history, it is important to remember what we can truly be thankful for. Tomorrow, give a moment to thank the hard working nurses and doctors who have done what they can to save as many lives as possible in this year. That's what Thanksgiving is all about: even in the worst of times, we need to give thanks to the people who made this year just a little bit less shitty than it could have been. That's absolutely something to be thankful for. For the 80-hour weeks, for the endless stress, for the worry of contracting COVID19 and spreading it to the ones they love. The frontline workers: be they paramedics, doctors, or nurses, have put in extra effort this year. Their work is usually seen in a negative light (# of deaths), because its impossible to see the converse (# of lives saved).

jtbayly 6y ago
>with 2020 shaking up to be one of the "worst years" in history... Really? No. Not even one of the worst in living memory.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Those downvoting me really need to read more history.
  - watwut 6y ago
    People on HN tend to think that Pancer General teaches you about motivations of German WWII commanders. Or that 300 is actually history of Sparta. I am not even joking here, those are literally apparently upvoted comments I seen.
- gruez 6y ago
  Right? I'm thinking ww2/ww1/spanish flu must be much worse? Wikipedia says covid-19 killed around 1.4M so far, but the spanish flu killed between 17-11 million.

akeck 6y ago

PTSD in healthcare workers is going to be a silent secondary "pandemic" for years to come.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

I've got a friend who's a nurse in a local hospital. She's in the OB ward but has a half dozen patients on her floor with Covid. She says at least half is on antianxiety meds (xanax); she just got a talking-to from her doc who refused to refill her prescription. Apparently, the first bottle is available for anyone with the connections, but after that they start talking about addiction and asking questions. They are offering extra pay; they are understaffed with positions open for RNs at $50/hr plus a 30% bonus (not sure why that's not just $65). About 40% of the staff has or has had COVID.

jamie_ca 6y ago
Cynical take: 30% bonus is there for retention. If you don't stick around for the year to hit the bonus, that's salary they don't need to pay you.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  That’s not cynical, that’s the purpose of a bonus. To ensure retention until the bonus is paid, and if you don’t stick around until the payout date, then you don’t get a bonus. You also stagger the bonus accrual and the payout time so that when the bonus is paid, they are halfway to accruing next year’s bonus so if they want to leave, they have to contemplate giving up a half year’s worth of bonus.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    And to add, sometimes a new employer will pay out that “lost” bonus if they really want you. In my case, I was 3/4 into a 1yr retention bonus, and the new employer (which usually doesn’t do retention bonuses) agreed to give me the same bonus after staying for a year. Not exactly the same thing, but trying to encourage people to consider jobs even if they’re part-way into one of these retention arrangements. It was a ~$10k return for a few hours of negotiation. But I was prepared to walk away if I didn’t get it.
op03 6y ago
Immigration flood gates will be opened to solve this just as they did for Y2K.

renewiltord 6y ago

I'll do it. Lots of the things they can do can be outsourced to a cheaper less-trained individual. I know because the sleep deprivation means half of them are working at the capacity of a drunk version of me. The number of mistakes surgical assistants make that surgeons have to watch out for is quite something. Veteran surgeons like my parents have top notch surgical teams they've cultivated over time. But most surgeries aren't performed by veterans. American society is unable to use versatile individuals because it is advanced: sophisticated power structures have powerful propaganda arms that block efficient utilization. Many things in life have transferable skills. Big parts about being a Registered Nurse are just being meticulous and memorizing large quantities of information: both things people like me are exceptional at. And my tolerance for risk is high. I'd smokejump if you needed me, I'd work on COVID patients if you needed me. With my own PPE if you so desire. But you won't. Because let's be honest, there are those who want to preserve the order for their own reasons, those who want to live in interesting times, and those who fear change.

jeffrallen 6y ago
Thanks. But you are not scalable. You know what is? An entire society taking this thing seriously.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  There are many like me. I'd wager in the tens of thousands willing and able. If we'd started in March, you'd have had us trained by now. If you start reservist wildfire training me now, I'll be ready by next season. Certification fetishism is ruining America's agility. Unsurprising. All societies switch from exploration to exploitation to preservation at some point until they are replaced by a new disruptor. It happened to Britain. It's happening to America.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > If we'd started in March In March, I was trying to convince my family that COVID19 even existed. We did start in March. Discussing that COVID19 is real, that masks help, and that pooling health care resources was needed for the imminent future. Fortunately, my local area is doing good on stockpiling PPE, expanding hospital beds / resources and more. The issue is that a good chunk of America decided that COVID19 was a fake virus that only afflicted China, no wait, only affected Europe... no wait... only affected liberal cities. There was no way for it to spread around the country. Sad fact: its too late to change the nursing situation now. Your state is either ready for this, or it isn't. Too late to change things. You had since January to prepare (when China announced to the world the COVID19 issue), maybe March (when New York City announced to the country that COVID19 arrived on our shores). What we can do is start the propaganda campaigns needed to get mass vaccinations ready.

bigbubba 6y ago

If their industry didn't artificially restrict the supply of labor to keep their wages sky high, they wouldn't be so overworked now that more is required of them. My sympathy is nonexistent; they've made out like bandits for years and now they're paying the price for that (unfortunately, that's a price that must be paid by the rest of us too.) I hope they begin to take this as a wakeup call. To the downvoters, let me ask you this: how many Americans have been driven into medical bankruptcy while their doctors are living in multi-million dollar McMansions? The system in America is the way doctors have designed it. They have outsized political power; legislators heed their lobbyists. They created and perpetuated this system so they could profit from it. They have been hoisted by their own petard.

nishantk 6y ago
you're blaming ground-level individual doctors and nurses for administrative and systematic industry failures. In a heavily regulated and specialized industry where mobility is more limited.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Doctor run hospitals aren't any cheaper. Collectively, doctors control the regulation and administration of their own industry. The AMA is one of the largest lobbyists in America. They have incredible political influence.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  No, this guy is actually correct. The supply of medical doctors is kept artificially low in order to keep salaries artificially high. I ran into this firsthand. I was actually a pre-med student in college, but as I really dug into how the whole system works and found out that physicians' groups and lobbies work to prevent new medical schools from being established, to keep spots in existing medical schools scarce, to keep their salaries inflated, I got disgusted and instead finished my degree in biological sciences with a focus in evolutionary biology. The system needs an enormous overhaul and reform. There are some workarounds being implemented to address demand, notably nurse practitioners, who have almost the same powers and privileges as M.D.s, but not quite. That's even changing though. But the core of OP's post is totally correct. A huge part of this situation we find ourselves in right now is due to good old-fashioned greed and protectionism.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

Anecdote time. My GF is an OT, burnt out as hell, and pushing through it. Walking away means just not being paid for a while, because the options are either 1) go to a different facility, which wouldn't make anything better because the whole industry is struggling with covid, or 2) go to a job outside the industry, which means reskilling or making unskilled wages with a bachelor's+master's sized mountain of student loan debt, or 3) just quitting and burning through savings for a while. Before covid, it was already an abusive job. She doesn't quit a job that is super abusive because it feels like abandoning patients. Her employers take advantage of that. And then the world goes "thanks docs and nurses" and then the rest of the industry on the front lines is like, yeah I guess we're invisible. And if her wages did go up, everyone would just gripe about how abusive it is that healthcare (a human right!) costs so much. She puts up with so much horrible shit, working so much harder than I do for so much less, because her patients really, really matter to her. If you judge healthcare workers for walking out, understand that they're dealing with tremendous pressure and abuse. If you judge healthcare workers for not walking out, like they're just getting what's coming, reaping what they sow, understand that they do this for reasons that aren't just money, and be thankful that they are willing to give more than they get. They're burning out helping people. Have empathy.

wolco2 6y ago
Burned out nurses and nurse feeling guilty and covering up for admin cost cutting doesn't help anyone. From a nurse prespective it's a difficult choice and without a safety net people are forced into these choices. There is no easy answer now. I would not know what to tell them.

908B64B197 6y ago

For years they enabled the AMA to cap residency spots and created an artificial scarcity & drive prices up. Now they are whining that they are a scarce resource?

908B64B197 6y ago
I see the downvotes but no explanations!
- fairity 6y ago
  People who run high on empathy generally think those that who don't feel empathy are bad people. Based on your comment, they are assuming you don't feel empathy. And, downvoting you is their way of settling their negative judgment.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Making healthcare a scarce resource isn't empathic either.
    - fairity 6y ago
      True but besides the point. They want a more forthright expression of empathy. If you simply prefaced your comment with “I really feel for our frontline workers.” they’d upvote you instead.
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
        so it would be better to say: I really feel for our frontline workers. But for years they enabled the AMA to cap residency spots and created an artificial scarcity that drove prices of healthcare up. Now they are whining that they are a scarce resource? And they, using the money they acquired by leveraging their scarcity, even bought a submarine piece of PR to buy sympathy from the public so that they don't try to figure out why exactly they are so scarce! But again, I really feel for our front-line workers. If only there was a way to have more of them yet budgeting the same amount for healthcare. Yeah, that does sound better.

michaniskin 6y ago

It's just a job. Nobody is being forced to go to work. If you don't like your job, or if you can't do your job, you can quit and get another job. This is America. As long as people are griping and complaining instead of quitting we know we're in good shape.

dragontamer 6y ago
> Nobody is being forced to go to work. Your patients will die if you don't go to work. You're not "forced" to go in. But there's a strong sense of duty here. Its life-or-death. Nurses / doctors chose this profession because they want to save lives.
- michaniskin 6y ago
  Sure, there are pros and cons to going to work. That's why it's called work. Every job has them.
skim_milk 6y ago
This is one part of the problem though, I know someone in the hospital staffing industry and they have 28,000 open positions in America for skilled nursing alone even with the huge pay increases. Just hope you don't get sick in the next year. And besides, the job tree has stopped bearing its fruit because it is out of season and it's been picked dry already.
- michaniskin 6y ago
  So prices will go up. That's how we get other people to voluntarily do things for us. I don't see a problem there.
kristjansson 6y ago
Sure, but the terminal point of that logic is _an exodus of healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic_. Seems like something to avoid?
- 6y ago

engineer_22 6y ago

I'm sure some of these folks could really use a break. But we need them! So please remember next time you're in a healthcare setting to treat your providers and nurses with dignity and respect! Then we need to start talking, as a nation, what our goals are for our healthcare industry and what we're willing to set aside to achieve those goals. Clearly we were not prepared for this pandemic, maybe we need to make some structural changes. Tertiary question, would Obamacare have alleviated this situation?

djsumdog 6y ago
The same should be said of police officers as well.

m0llusk 6y ago

This might be an opportunity to trigger rethinking of how we handle some of our labor pools. Stress is extreme with the medical sector now, but there are signs of similar related stresses in other sectors also. Construction, Education, and Software Engineering all site high labor costs and low labor availability. At the same time the number of adults of prime working age looking for work and not finding it is at record highs as is the number of frustrated working age people that have left the labor pool. If we had more onramps into these generally lauded labor markets then there might be greater flexibility and humanity in responses to stress, especially really serious stresses such as we see now. Make it possible to get limited training for some kind of assistant position and people can gain experience and potentially move up the ladder or simply serve as useful fodder that insulate better trained and more experienced workers from the worst stresses. Instead potential workers are eliminated early on by requirements that are often old and limited in proven relevance. And apart from all that there are cultural limitations. It isn't some weird mistake or detailed physical evaluation that keeps female participation in construction at extreme lows and male participation in education of the young similarly low. There are serious social barriers involved. Up till now we have had the luxury of setting up expensive many years long training gateways and arbitrary cultural barriers with these fields, but this isn't necessarily rational and forces limitations which are contributing to dangerous overload.