5 ms·
Going through an extended close-family medical situation at the moment in a U.S. top-10 metro. A few anecdotes: - Almost everywhere is short staffed. This has
by bane 5y ago
Going through an extended close-family medical situation at the moment in a U.S. top-10 metro. A few anecdotes:
- Almost everywhere is short staffed. This has dragged out simple things like medical transport tremendously.
- There appears to be plenty of beds and equipment. In 3 different facilities 40 miles apart from each other there were numerous empty beds from ER to rehabilitation.
- Low-end jobs like in-home medical assistant are basically vacant at the moment. After a month we've been unable to find anybody who can come provide basic support services.
- Specialist doctors are generally available.
- Supplies of medical equipment, blood, etc. seems basically normal. I even offered to supply a transfusion and was turned down as they had enough units on hand.
- Medical imaging systems seem to be very overtaxed with very delayed appointments at two different imaging centers and 3 different machines.
- Travel nurses are everywhere - these are contract-guns of the nursing world, fly in and make very serious money while filling staffing gaps. One nurse we spoke to is making north of $200k/yr at current rate.
- Vaccine mandate has had 3-5% attrition. The low levels of staffing appears to be almost entirely from people burned out on the high workload.
- There's interesting "pockets" of ethnic groups in different parts of the medical system at the moment as people are in-sourced to the U.S. to make up gaps. e.g. All West Africans in one ICU, East Africans in rehab and some home care, Latinos and Philippinos in home services. It's absolutely fascinating.
- Some nurses and technicians seem woefully untrained. We (me and my immediate family) seemed to have better training than some dedicated staff, which was quite scary.
- Some facilities are absolutely filthy. We're reporting those.
- One facility we went to had just laid off a huge number of support staff and technicians. Not sure why, but somebody mentioned that Covid has basically broken provider's financial models.
- Insurance provider seems entirely unfazed by all of this and is attempting to operate with a business as usual policy. As a result I've never seen people have to fight so hard for so little, many things that would actually improve care and be cheaper for the provider.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago> There's interesting "pockets" of ethnic groups in different parts of the medical system at the moment as people are in-sourced to the U.S. to make up gaps. e.g. All West Africans in one ICU, East Africans in rehab and some home care, Latinos and Philippinos in home services. It's absolutely fascinating. It is not fascinating to me. It is still the same old playbook of trying to get away with increasing the supply of cheap labor, quality be damned. The government (society) could drastically increases wages for all those in home care and changing bed pan jobs from $15 per hour to something reasonable that could entice locals who speak American English and can easily communicate. But we will not because that will result in an unacceptable wealth transfer to those at the bottom. Well, technically, we are okay with the wealth transfer to the bottom, just not to those already in the country.