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nursing is “not that complex” in the same sense that programming is “typing characters into a file”. my sister is doing critical care work as a nurse in a covi

nursing is “not that complex” in the same sense that programming is “typing characters into a file”. my sister is doing critical care work as a nurse in a covid crisis zone earning less than 60K a year. this is with a decade of experience in some of the top hospitals in the country. i think HN has a very California/New York view of nurse’s compensation and status. her previous hospital responded to covid by firing a lot of nursing staff (grandma’s couldn’t get knee replacements, but covid wasn’t super bad here yet so hospitals just shed resources only to need them again in two months). hospital administrations responded to the crisis by cutting staff, cutting pay, and increasing their own salaries, while taking months to procure PPE for their workers. at the height of the iraq war, it was a big news story that soldiers had not been receiving adequate protection and that some of the vehicle and personnel armor they had received was defective. if we want to make a war analogy, this is blackwater contractors getting paid millions to play at war games geared to the tits and barely ever leaving the green zone while the soldiers doing the real grunt work are getting shredded by mandatory redeployments with no leave and issued substandard gear. on top of that, covid has been functionally live clinical experimentation at mass scale. a lot of medicine has been made rote, so i think jaded people think it is just a big book of instructions. this pandemic was figuring things out live at runtime. the compassionate response to a massive crisis in healthcare worker morale brought on by burnout due to extremely fast paced, high risk, high stress, highly specified work conditions during a global pandemic is something like “i hope this can be managed so that care can continue to be delivered” and not “they should get a new job”.

michaniskin 6y ago
That's a terrible analogy because thousands of newly minted programmers come out of abbreviated code bootcamp type programs all the time, and go right to work. Anyway, the army actually does this. Even the special forces 18D medic training (the most elite and rigorous medical training they provide) is only a year long, and they can do everything a nurse can do plus, for example, perform surgery on goats.
michaniskin 6y ago
You edited your post, so I'll reply separately to the added content here. The difference between the military and the healthcare system is that soldiers can't quit, but healthcare workers can. Every single healthcare worker in America is working at that job because they prefer that job to all other alternative jobs available to them. This is trivially true because if they preferred another job they could quit and take that job. Of course, we all have stress, and nobody likes their job, and everyone gripes and complains, and everyone's bosses are slave drivers, and everyone's customers are demanding. That's why it's a job and not a hobby. I stand by my argument that most of the work of monitoring and caring for covid patients can be performed adequately by semi-skilled workers.

michaniskin 6y ago

That's a terrible analogy because thousands of newly minted programmers come out of abbreviated code bootcamp type programs all the time, and go right to work. Anyway, the army actually does this. Even the special forces 18D medic training (the most elite and rigorous medical training they provide) is only a year long, and they can do everything a nurse can do plus, for example, perform surgery on goats.

michaniskin 6y ago

You edited your post, so I'll reply separately to the added content here. The difference between the military and the healthcare system is that soldiers can't quit, but healthcare workers can. Every single healthcare worker in America is working at that job because they prefer that job to all other alternative jobs available to them. This is trivially true because if they preferred another job they could quit and take that job. Of course, we all have stress, and nobody likes their job, and everyone gripes and complains, and everyone's bosses are slave drivers, and everyone's customers are demanding. That's why it's a job and not a hobby. I stand by my argument that most of the work of monitoring and caring for covid patients can be performed adequately by semi-skilled workers.