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Is this a shock? - Demanding work: 12 hour shifts, irregular schedules, night shifts, physically exhausting, limited breaks (including bathroom/water!) - High

Is this a shock? - Demanding work: 12 hour shifts, irregular schedules, night shifts, physically exhausting, limited breaks (including bathroom/water!) - High responsibility with unsafe conditions. You're literally responsible for people's lives. Poor staffing ratios stretch you thin and make you more likely to make mistakes. And if you make a mistake, you're at huge risk for litigation... and now criminal consequences too. Responsibilities, resources, and staffing stretched even thinner due to the pandemic. - Administration that treats you as something to be optimized and does the absolute bare minimum to support you. Instead they tack on additional tasks, expectations, and requirements ("no water at a nurse's station!"). They encourage a culture where nurses provide a concierge service to 'guests' instead of critical care to patients. - Hostile/entitled patients. I'd guess many/most patients are not an issue, but it only takes a couple of difficult/combative patients to really ruin your conditions. - Low pay given the responsibility and working conditions for non-travel nurses. https://nurseslabs.com/nurse-salary/#nurse_salaries_by_state https://nurseslabs.com/nurse-salary/#nurse_salaries_by_state Like many others pointed out here, in tech I make way more than a nurse for a job that's less demanding, has far lower stakes, and is of far less value to society. To me the blame lies mainly in middle/upper management, whose role is to build and empower an effective workforce. If 90% of your workers are considering leaving, you blew it.

tsol 4y ago
The pay was good enough last year, what changed? In my opinon nursing has always been a difficult job, yet they've always had people lining up to become nurses. So it must be more than just 'the job is too demanding'.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Pure speculation, but if I had to hazard a guess, it's because the job is becoming increasingly inhumane. More and more, nurses have to act like robots to remain in compliance, and that's not what any of them signed up for, and the increasing lack of intangible reward that comes from caring for people and creating a human connection, means they demand more explicit monetary reward for temporarily suppressing their humanity to do the job.
- lupire 4y ago
  COVID protocols and protestors, combined with the decay of the ongoing K-12 and college education system, Great Resignation, and general economic malaise of Millennials and Zoomers.
- pbuzbee 4y ago
  I think most of what I listed, except pay, has gotten worse since the pandemic started. - A large fraction of patients see the pandemic as overblown and nurses as perpetuating the myth. It's gotta be hard to care for someone who mistrusts you from the beginning. - For those nurses taking care of COVID patients, it's probably tough to watch the cycle of death, and moreso when you know many could have taken steps to prevent it. - The pandemic obviously puts a strain on the healthcare system, including its workers. More patients, longer hours, etc surely gets to be exhausting after doing it for 2 years. - Administration that says they care but do the bare minimum to boost conditions or morale. A pizza party isn't as meaningful when you're struggling with an unsafe patient load. - There's a feedback loop. As more nurses quit, the burden gets heavier on those who remain. So even if pay hasn't dropped, the conditions have gotten worse. It's not a surprise that eventually people decide that it just isn't worth it anymore.
hackernewds 4y ago
Some of these conditions have always existed. But I can't imagine 90% have wanted to quit in the last decade. The most important factor thus is most likely COVID
- atoav 4y ago
  Like with many jobs Covid revealed what society truly values and what not. Sure clapping for nurses, nice. But these people should have propper working conditions and wages, otherwise nobody will want to do the job. Covid just gave the realization that even if we face a global crisis where nurses are dying on the front, the rest of society is not willing to provide the bare minimum these people deserve.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    Exactly this. The nursing profession has been accumulating empathetic debt for probably decades. By empathetic debt I mean nurses taking on more work and responsibility beyond personal rational choice because if they fall short then patients suffer. the truly tragic part of all of this is that as much as we would like to imagine these nurses confidently walking away from a bad situation like some sort of power move.. a lot of them are not. A lot are finally leaving because they are broken and feel broken enough that they dont feel capable of being responsible for patients anymore. To reiterate- many (most?) nurses that quit still want to help people, but no longer feel capable of helping. That is a level of trauma that can be passed down to the next generation. It might take effort to let the gravity of this reality sink in. Anecdotally, my mom is a nurse and she has come home and cried due to sheer helplessness to her work problems on more than one occasion. Shes near retirement age and switched careers into this late in life to help people so this is pretty much it for her. If the system does not show mercy and continues to grind her out then she leaves the workforce feeling helpless and broken. It goes beyond payment. better pay will go a LONG way, and is absolutely necessary.. but it is not enough. There needs to be more redundancy, because 100% utilization of that kind of resource in that kind of system is something that would get you a failing grade in system design.
dguest 4y ago
The traveling nurse phenomenon is exemplary bureaucratic absurdity. To paraphrase a conversation with a nurse friend: Nurse: It's really hard for us to hold on to our good nurses, we can't afford support staff so they get stressed out and leave for traveling gigs. Me: Why can't you afford support staff? Nurse: The traveling nurses cost 3x more. We have to hire traveling nurses to replace the ones that left for traveling gigs. Me: ... Nurse: I know... Me: Can't we just... pretend they are all traveling nurses? Nurse: I know... I'm not a big fan of defrauding your employer, but sort of hope that some of these "traveling nurses" are somehow swapping gigs secretly and subletting their temporary housing to college students.
- SamuelAdams 4y ago
  Part of it is that travelers are contractors. Management only has to pay for that contract for 3-6 months, then technically that cost is no longer an issue. Whereas an FTE nurse is a recurring annual expense, so higher wages will lead to higher long-term costs. Everyone in hospital administration is expecting demand to die down once COVID surges die down, so they don’t want to make any long-term financial changes.
jjice 4y ago
> Low pay given the responsibility and working conditions The pay to responsibility ratio for nurses is absurdly low. So unfortunate given the difficulty of the profession. I guess we'll see if anything changes over the next handful of years.

tsol 4y ago

The pay was good enough last year, what changed? In my opinon nursing has always been a difficult job, yet they've always had people lining up to become nurses. So it must be more than just 'the job is too demanding'.

anonporridge 4y ago
Pure speculation, but if I had to hazard a guess, it's because the job is becoming increasingly inhumane. More and more, nurses have to act like robots to remain in compliance, and that's not what any of them signed up for, and the increasing lack of intangible reward that comes from caring for people and creating a human connection, means they demand more explicit monetary reward for temporarily suppressing their humanity to do the job.
lupire 4y ago
COVID protocols and protestors, combined with the decay of the ongoing K-12 and college education system, Great Resignation, and general economic malaise of Millennials and Zoomers.
pbuzbee 4y ago
I think most of what I listed, except pay, has gotten worse since the pandemic started. - A large fraction of patients see the pandemic as overblown and nurses as perpetuating the myth. It's gotta be hard to care for someone who mistrusts you from the beginning. - For those nurses taking care of COVID patients, it's probably tough to watch the cycle of death, and moreso when you know many could have taken steps to prevent it. - The pandemic obviously puts a strain on the healthcare system, including its workers. More patients, longer hours, etc surely gets to be exhausting after doing it for 2 years. - Administration that says they care but do the bare minimum to boost conditions or morale. A pizza party isn't as meaningful when you're struggling with an unsafe patient load. - There's a feedback loop. As more nurses quit, the burden gets heavier on those who remain. So even if pay hasn't dropped, the conditions have gotten worse. It's not a surprise that eventually people decide that it just isn't worth it anymore.

hackernewds 4y ago

Some of these conditions have always existed. But I can't imagine 90% have wanted to quit in the last decade. The most important factor thus is most likely COVID

atoav 4y ago
Like with many jobs Covid revealed what society truly values and what not. Sure clapping for nurses, nice. But these people should have propper working conditions and wages, otherwise nobody will want to do the job. Covid just gave the realization that even if we face a global crisis where nurses are dying on the front, the rest of society is not willing to provide the bare minimum these people deserve.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cupofpython 4y ago
  Exactly this. The nursing profession has been accumulating empathetic debt for probably decades. By empathetic debt I mean nurses taking on more work and responsibility beyond personal rational choice because if they fall short then patients suffer. the truly tragic part of all of this is that as much as we would like to imagine these nurses confidently walking away from a bad situation like some sort of power move.. a lot of them are not. A lot are finally leaving because they are broken and feel broken enough that they dont feel capable of being responsible for patients anymore. To reiterate- many (most?) nurses that quit still want to help people, but no longer feel capable of helping. That is a level of trauma that can be passed down to the next generation. It might take effort to let the gravity of this reality sink in. Anecdotally, my mom is a nurse and she has come home and cried due to sheer helplessness to her work problems on more than one occasion. Shes near retirement age and switched careers into this late in life to help people so this is pretty much it for her. If the system does not show mercy and continues to grind her out then she leaves the workforce feeling helpless and broken. It goes beyond payment. better pay will go a LONG way, and is absolutely necessary.. but it is not enough. There needs to be more redundancy, because 100% utilization of that kind of resource in that kind of system is something that would get you a failing grade in system design.

dguest 4y ago

The traveling nurse phenomenon is exemplary bureaucratic absurdity. To paraphrase a conversation with a nurse friend: Nurse: It's really hard for us to hold on to our good nurses, we can't afford support staff so they get stressed out and leave for traveling gigs. Me: Why can't you afford support staff? Nurse: The traveling nurses cost 3x more. We have to hire traveling nurses to replace the ones that left for traveling gigs. Me: ... Nurse: I know... Me: Can't we just... pretend they are all traveling nurses? Nurse: I know... I'm not a big fan of defrauding your employer, but sort of hope that some of these "traveling nurses" are somehow swapping gigs secretly and subletting their temporary housing to college students.

SamuelAdams 4y ago
Part of it is that travelers are contractors. Management only has to pay for that contract for 3-6 months, then technically that cost is no longer an issue. Whereas an FTE nurse is a recurring annual expense, so higher wages will lead to higher long-term costs. Everyone in hospital administration is expecting demand to die down once COVID surges die down, so they don’t want to make any long-term financial changes.

jjice 4y ago

> Low pay given the responsibility and working conditions The pay to responsibility ratio for nurses is absurdly low. So unfortunate given the difficulty of the profession. I guess we'll see if anything changes over the next handful of years.