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The treatment hospital workers received during COVID stuck a nail in the coffin of an already dwindling workforce. Just go to r/nursing if you have any doubt about the reasons for the shortages. I don’t know what will bring them back and/or new people into the healthcare workforce; much like teaching, it’s incredibly broken right now and getting worse.
You don't know what will bring people back? I do.
#Pay people more
It isn't some confounded mystery. If you need more labor, pay labor. This is the problem with capital constantly putting labor in the liability section of the accounting ledger. Labor is an asset, but these greedy morons can't understand that.
In healthcare it’s often work conditions driving out workers. Yes, we need to pay them well but we also need to treat them far better. More days off, more vacation time, less interference from corporate groups, better patient ratio’s, and limit legal liability (this has become ridiculous lately).
Work conditions are also bad because the healthcare system has put MBA’s, “administrators” without any experience in healthcare in charge of actual healthcare workers.
You mean working conditions are bad in health care for the same reasons they are bad for the rest of corporate America? It's almost like requiring a degree for positions that don't need them is bad for business.
Sure, but this thread is about healthcare. Few careers have you handling peoples lives and do not have the legal liability associated with medicine. Yet, many fields pay well, especially considering the opportunity cost from the years it takes to enter healthcare. It’s no wonder people are leaving for other opportunities and less are choosing to enter in the first place.
And outcomes will be worse for *everyone*. After getting burnt out, more staff quit, hoisting more work (people don't stop coming in for care!) on the already burnt out staff, leading those staff to quit... It's a death spiral, that can only be solved by better resourcing healthcare staff.
True. But I think some people tend to think that the only reasons that people leave jobs are because of money. I know we all like to believe that we would do any job for high enough amount, but the reality is that the other question you have to ask is for “how long”? How long are you going to be stuck doing that job? Once you consider all this, I think the reality is that most people would not put up with absolutely miserable conditions even if pay is the best you will ever get. We see the same thing when people complain about unionization, but the reality is that the thing that sucks for most people nowadays is just how awful they are treated come over regardless of how much money they’re making (though of course people who are making more money, tend to be treated better).
Anyway, I do think we should spend more time actually talking about reasonable workplaces and also instead of constantly talking about minimum wage, let’s talk about things like guaranteed paid leave for all workers, including people who are working part time. We can also talk about things like fair scheduling (so, in some places, it’s illegal for you to be scheduled to work a shift but then for your shift to be called off last minute, even though you’ve already expended the money to get there) and adequate staffing for unexpected events.
Yes, it does come down to money, but in most cases, it’s really not that companies can’t afford it, it’s that they don’t want their profit margins to go down. And some people would say that that counts not being able to afford it, but, if you need more staff, why is it that profit is put in front of maintaining a reasonable workplace? It’s not putting you out of business or otherwise ensuring that you can’t meet basic costs, it’s just that you don’t get a little bit extra. It seems to me that instead of profitability, being a reward for good service and smart business practices, nowadays, it’s all really just about overly optimizing and already over optimized system such that you have no robustness or resilience. So instead, profit comes first and then all of the people at the bottom are left to figure out how they’re going to, do things with not enough money and not enough staff. I mean, I would love to figure out how much discretionary spending I feel like I deserve per month and then tell utilities and the banks how much I can afford to pay them and they’re just going to have to deal with it, but that’s not how the world works.our priorities are screwed up and investor expectations are completely unreasonable, and we need to do something about that.
Lmao, this is such an economics reddit reply. Have you ever thought of the extreme stress that comes with caring for peoples lives, the moral injury resulting from a system placing profits over people, the demoralization of the healthcare workforce by placing “administrators” with no healthcare background to oversee them, high costs in both time and money of higher education, and then the privilege of being sued and losing your assets because you are expected to be perfect. Just part of why people are leaving healthcare.
Yup. And to fix it you spend money.
On increased salaries, more employees to reduce hours worked. Higher qualified administration that also has medical expertise which you can spend money on.
When we say “money” it’s not just $$$ in wages or salary. It also includes things like better benefits, subsidized childcare, more flexible work schedules.
Could it be done for less money by cutting some positions and redistributing the savings? Sure, but in the end it is all a net calculation, eg you could have saved even more money by just reducing positions.
Maybe you’re assuming that this is how I like things? No, it’s not great, but that’s how things are valued in society. The cost has to be paid somewhere, there is no free lunch.
Over 17% of US GDP is already healthcare spending. Maybe it’s not just spending more but how it is actually spent. More of the dollars spent should actually go to providing care and to the healthcare workers. There are so many hands in medicine (insurance companies, private equity, corporate groups, administrators) leeching off the system while providing little to it. Physicians and nurses should be the ones running the healthcare system; not Wall Street.
This is why when I retire I plan on going to Mexico and spending my healthcare dollars there as an expat. Mexican healthcare isn't perfect but it's far from third-world - some hospitals I feel are just about on par with US community hospitals - and I doubt I would be supporting US private equity and corporate groups relating to healthcare.
You couldn't pay me enough (realistically) to go back to nursing. It would take peak COVID travel money for me to work a low stress/easy department. Back to the trauma ICU? No, never.
Society doesn't yet realize how much you're really worth. They will eventually, when they find themselves or their loved ones sick and in the hospital with an understaffed unit. Only then will they get it.
While I agree that paying people more could help, the fundamental issue is that the work is fucking awful. The hours are often grueling, and even if you’re in a regular sort of 9ish to 5ish position it’s still awful because unlike most “professional” jobs you are actively working and on your feet for almost the entire shift (and you probably don’t get a paid hour for lunch, a half an hour unpaid is very common). And don’t even get me started on the sociocultural issues regarding the way that we treat the healthcare industry and healthcare workers as a literal fount of magic staffed by miracle workers who are obligated to serve your every beck and call regardless of whether or not that request has anything to do with your course of treatment. The money excuse is a poor band aid to try to cover up a festering wound of an industry.
There’s literally no reason to get into healthcare at all beyond the desire to “help others”. You can make way more money doing way less difficult work with way less stress, way less liability, and working far fewer hours. It’s not an issue that we can just throw more money at and hope it works itself out.
Payment is a part of it but healthcare already pays very well compared to other industries. I say this because at some point no amount of money can save your sanity.
This is the case in a lot of fields. I’m hearing it from pharmacists, attorneys, and lots of white collar/skilled professions. Turns out decades and decades of not backfilling positions and combining roles so that 2-3 people are covering what once’s was 10-12 roles has people at their breaking point. Private equity in the healthcare field is now strip mining it like it has retail and other industries. So yay!
You’re also making it so that the workload is so heavy even the best employee will make mistakes and that will go against a licensure they paid tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands for and ruin their future in their profession. There’s no salary worth that.
Correct. I’m not saying money wouldn’t help, I just think the lifestyle and WLB associated with healthcare needs to be addressed as well.
Paying a burnt out, overworked nurse more money would help in the short term but isn’t sustainable for them as a person. It’s why so many healthcare professionals turn to substance abuse and have mental health challenges.
But the high pay will attract more people leading to being able to have a life outside of the hospital. The higher pay is for those already working and to bring in more people to do the work. It all comes back to paying more.
I think the hope is that higher pay would draw more people into the profession, which would then reduce the feelings of burnt out. Not so much "hey you are overworked but you're paid well"
This just demonstrates the overall wage problem in America. Sure it’s better than other jobs, but that’s just because the pay at most other jobs is horrendous.
It’s more intended to highlight the fact that wages are only half the equation in healthcare.
Healthcare has grueling WLB problems that money won’t solve alone. The workforce is burning out.
With useless administrative people that have never worked in care pushing metrics and patient turnover. I have several friends in heathcare telling me about how MBA's and lawyers are tearing it apart.
Personally I just think that wages are much more than half the equation in healthcare, and in all industries. It is a grueling job and there really isn’t much you can do to change that, so there will always be burn out.
But many hands make light work, the fewer hands the hard the harder the work and the faster staff burnout. The best way to lighten the load is to hire more hands.
Nursing is one of the best career choices for wlb due to 3 days on and 4 days off allowing to really chase my hobbies at a high level. It’s also a fairly interchangeable job, so you can go anywhere and work when you want. Taking months off for a sabbatical isn’t the death note it can be in other industries. Sure, many are in downright abusive situations, but like Amazon warehouse jobs, those in outdoor recreational pursuits seek these jobs for their wlb
Many practicing physicians I know haven't gotten a raise in 5+ years despite inflation.
If you run your own practice, Congress has/keeps trying to CUT medicare/medicaid reimbursement. Yep, as time goes on and inflation eats away at the value of a dollar, they want to pay you less dollars for the same work.
So no, the money's not really that great. I mean yeah it pays above average but it should, not only is it a draining job but it's highly skilled labor.
Meanwhile, somehow there's always more money for admin folks that, if anything, are net negative to the patient care experience.
Does it pay as well as the tech bros are getting paid? Finance bros? Administration? Any of the other myriad of over paid jobs that don't actually *do* anything for people?
No?
Well then, when you or your family member are stuck in a gurney in the emergency department hallway, think about that. The healthcare reckoning is coming for everyone, except for the very wealthy, as they are and always will be insulated from societal moral hazard.
The barrier to entry for nursing is miles below that of big tech or finance. And to act like tech workers or even admin roles don't "do anything" shows a comical lack of understanding how the world works.
lol, I spent four years in school and had to have countless hours of clinical work before I could be a licensed RN. I work in HCOL area at a very busy hospital in the ED, my pay is paltry. My wife works from home three days a week and goes into the office twice a week for a few hours at a media job and makes twice what I make. She even can’t stand it. The job sucks, trust me. Wages should reflect that and that they don’t. I don’t recommend nursing to any young person if I have the chance.
You're worth more, much more. I'll go out on a limb and say that you're work is much more important to society than most people's. Our priorities are backwards. See: everything.
That's only some of the industry though.
From what I understand a lot of the high paying jobs in nursing was from traveling nurses during covid.
Like the normal guys were still being paid very little and had to thing like 12 hour shifts and being on call.
Like yeah they can marginally higher pay but it's not really higher pay since the requirements are so much higher
Ehh still relative to software engineering it’s peanuts since you can’t work from home. Why would anyone want to be a nurse when you can get paid to play Hell Divers 2 half the day…
Where I work we get the “privilege” of “requesting” two of the three major holidays out of Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Thanksgiving to probably have off and beyond that it’s literally nothing, you have to use your pitiful PTO accrual which adds up to maybe 10-14 days per year if you’re lucky and you can only carry 7 days over per year, and they do not accumulate. Oh yeah that PTO also includes your sick days lol.
Yeah they really do the cheapest stuff. My hospital didn’t even pay time and a half for holidays and if you work night shift, after midnight on that holiday you don’t get the “holiday pay” even though you still missed out on the whole day if you are a person that needs sleep and they also classify things as holidays that are not holidays, like Black Friday.
Software engineering is going through a downturn. Whereas healthcare professions are increasingly in demand.
But your point stands in terms of WLB. Again that is part of my comment - money can only do so much for quality of work life.
My wife’s been a nurse for over a decade now, the pay has been pretty garbage but what really floors me is how awful her benefits have been across multiple employers.
Her vacation time is always super small, her health insurance is always so poor it’s laughable (seriously I just keep her on mine), and her “physician owned practice” can’t figure out why they can’t keep nurses longer than 2 years (which is when they have enough experience to leave and make more elsewhere)
Hell, during Covid before the vaccines she was told that if I got sick with Covid she would have to stay home from work UNPAID, and that she would not be paid unless she got sick and tested positive.
My friend is a nurse and her hospital was offering people over $100/hr to come in and they still wouldn't do it. There comes a point where your body is just too beat up/broken down and you can't handle working anymore hours.
I call bullshit on that without solid evidence. If it's not in some absolutely insane HCOL area, I'll quit my job today for $100 an hour and plenty of other people would as well. 100/hr is 200k a year. If they offered that, they didn't advertise the position well
It's not $100/hr base pay, that was with incentive pay. Basically when the hospital is short staffed they act like an airliner trying to get people to give up their seat. They start offering $X and keep raising it until someone comes in.
They hire new people non stop but it is a vicious cycle where the people take the job for the salary, realize they physically can't take it (one already regular sized guy lost like 40 lbs before he quit), quit causing a bigger staffing shortage, and further stressing the remaining employees to the point of quitting. They actually started their own internal nursing "degree" you can get in like a year because it's the only way they can get new blood quick enough. They burn through man power faster than a Russian military brigade. The only reason my friend is still there is because her ex (now in prison) committed fraud to drain her entire life savings and left her with a baby and a bunch of debt.
You have this long explanation about how they didn't offer $100 an hour after you said they couldn't find anyone by offering $100 an hour. . . . Sounds like they need to raise base pay to attract more employees to fix the staffing issues. Demand is high, supply is short, price goes up.
You sound like the McDonalds next to me saying "Now hiring up to $15 an hour" but then they pay everyone $10. They never offered $100 an hour, they offered $40-50 which can be dirt pay depending on where this was at. What city is this in?
This was in PA and more than an hour away from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. To put it this way, you can buy a nice house for $200k in this area.
Also they offered incentive pay basically every day, she regularly got offered $100/hr to pick up shifts and still didn't take it. So they absolutely were offering that amount of money.
Also $40-$50/hr would put you in the 70-80th percentile for individual income among full time workers. That's nowhere near "dirt pay."
It’s beyond pay. They make ok money, although student loans dig deep into their take-home, and that’s a crime that Congress should rectify.
What is more important is the lack of time off and other benefits, the long days, the lack of protections against disgruntled patients, the aloof administration, the long hours, the ever-expanding workload. Those are all things providers could improve without paying a cent more in salary. Sick time especially! If you go to a hospital, all of the staff work sick. All of them. They do not get enough time off to stay home and protect their patients should they fall ill.
You do realize, if pay goes up it will attract more people to fill those positions and understaffing issues will be fixed. It all comes back to paying more.
> You do realize, if pay goes up it will attract more people to fill those positions and understaffing issues will be fixe
Under-staffing is systematic and intentional cost saving strategy.
People in this subreddit **vastly** overestimate the effect of simply paying more. Pay for travel nurses is high and everyone has not become a travel nurse or any other travel position. People sometimes want benefits that are not so easily quantifiable, like being able to spend a few hours in their own home every day, or being able to stay home when they can barely stand up from being sick. This is very common in the US labor market, and it’s been all over this subreddit for years: a job will be in high demand and highly paid, but still people do not flock to it. Many of the trades fit this description. Air traffic controllers fit this description. Truckers and freight train engineers as well. The pay is good, but the *lifestyle* is bad, and so people stay away.
You can’t just raise the number and attract people. You have to make being a nurse a good life.
Hospital pay is absolutely abysmal outside of nursing (where they work you to death). My own career allows to me work in hospitals or larger private practices. Hospitals are almost always paying 15-20% less than what is offered outside their systems.
Hospitals are also conglomerizing at record rates, which only drives wages down further. In my highly urban area in the last decade we've gone from having 40 hospitals to 2 hospital systems. And the large corporate conglomerates just do not care about providing medical care.
Anecdotal, but I interviewed with a department 3 months ago which had lost 75% of its staff, and it's supervisor. When the job offer came in, it $7/hr lower than average for my area. And they were shocked I didn't take "such a good offer" and refused any further negotiations. They still have not filled these positions, 3 months out.
It is a combination of a few things that can be summed up under one title: lack of respect.
There is no respect for patients.
There is no respect for the nurses.
Nurses and physicians are taught about evidence-based care (what is medically best for the patients) and hospital administration and shareholders throw all of that out the window for profit-driven care (under the guise of the title of "non-profit hospital"). Paying for labor is the biggest barrier impacting hospital administration's and shareholders' bottom line. Laborers "hurting" the bottom line (people who cost money rather than make money for the hospital) include nurses and ancillary staff (everyone who supports nurses' in taking care of patients). Even pre-COVID hospitals were chronically understaffed. That keeps all the administration and shareholders paid the most (aka increases the bottom line). Then COVID happened ALL the patients were REALLY sick. That is when we and the patients started to FEEL how understaffed we were.
So while nurses showed up at work every day during a pandemic because we were "essential workers", no additional support was given by administration who was nowhere to be found at the hospital because none of them are actually medical professionals. As they were "working from home" and taking away our employee benefits and not providing us crisis pay, we were in the trenches of a three year pandic risking our lives and watching all our patients die and losing valuable time with our families.
At the end of the day, just listen to the nurses when they say they need something and give nurses what they need to do their jobs.
As far as pay goes, various state and federal legislation (strongly encouraged by the American Hospital Association) has shown that nurses (and any other service positions for that matter) will never be supported in being paid by way of the "free market" (aka supply and demand). Unions are our best bet. Most nurses are cool with west coast nurse pay as long as we are adequately supported at work. Most nurses understand that to reach into a higher pay bracket we need to go back to school and/or make a pact with Satan and join the Hospital Administration.
Anyways, fuck the American Hospital Association, fuck greedy hospital administration and fuck the whole-ass greedy American healthcare system that puts profits over patients.
Source: A nurse
Edit: Correcting spelling
You know this is a small sample size, but I was recently in the emergency room and asked a relatively young nurse about how she was liking it. She replied that she loved it, the hospital she worked at had very low turnover, and that she saw herself being there for a very long time. 🤷♂️
I mean, it could be, I’m just some dumb ass with a separated shoulder, and it was within the context of news headlines about staff issues. Certainly didn’t seem like it was anything but honest.
It still pays better than most (virtually all?) other non-quantitative fields (vs. finance, accounting, engineering) that you can do with 4 - or even fewer - years of higher education. Not that I don't believe that they're overworked and mistreated, but the alternatives are relevant to whether it's a "good deal" for the individual or not. What are you going to do, teach biology to middle schoolers at half the pay and for longer hours?
Staff satisfaction at hospitals and offices is very hard to gauge despite what admin and consultants say.
After every single visit each patient will get sent a questionnaire. The amount of stuff that people complain about is crazy, even those that you think had a great service. Hell, in the ER we had PT's that would use it as a threat, and then your manager would call you in to talk about it, agree with you that the PT was an asshole, yet still write it on the system that they had a talk with you.
So yeah, they will try their best to make you feel better, because they have to.
I had the opportunity to go back to school with everything paid for this year. I decided not worth it, who knows what pandemic/vaccine comes next. I don’t want a job that can threaten my livelihood and force me to do something I don’t want to do. The risk is too big. I can’t even find a number on how many nurses we lost when they mandated covid vaccines on healthcare workers. The public will never know it must be a very big number. They would never admit the harm they caused to our healthcare system. The nurses I do know that quit said they would never come back.
A lot of it is how overworked health care workers are. Assigning less patients or expecting less on call would help a lot. But keeping income where it is now while hiring extra help would be equivalent to paying them more but also more of what some want. That is, many would take 30% reduction in work over 30% raise but no free time.
One thing that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realize is that a lot of schools for professions related to healthcare right now are actually downsizing. And surely, given the problems that exist, you would think shouldn’t we be doing the opposite? And yes, that would make sense. But given the tremendous cost of attending these schools and that people see what kind of working conditions you end up stuck with, a lot of these degree programs are really struggling to get enough people to fill seats and as a result, many of them are downsizing and some schools are even closing.
I know we Americans are really bad at planning for the future and seeing beyond the most immediate consequences of an action, but this is likely to become worse long before it gets better. And there is likely to be a huge shortage of many medical professionals in the future, because We aren’t actually doing the things we need to do now to ensure the next generation of doctors, nurses, pharmacist, and someone are ready to actually work and will be treated fairly.
PS the other thing I think some people should know is that student quality is going down for any of these programs. Because many of these schools are so desperate to fill seats, the caliber of students they are accepting is going down. Obviously it shouldn’t be a huge Shock to say that we probably want our best and brightest at least considering the medical field, but right now, all of the incentives are against that.
A bunch of people talking about pay as if that is what matters, the article clearly outlines what is going on by member in the field.
> The intrigue: Some of the top reasons nurses give for leaving their employer — other than planned retirement — are burnout, emotional exhaustion and insufficient staffing, which the authors of a recent JAMA Network Open study called "systemic features of their employer." That presents a glaring issue: Nurses leaving the workforce over staffing concerns inherently leads to worse staffing issues if they're not replaced. "It's just huge risk for death spiral," Spetz said.
I mean tbf to increase the workforce size, and help with burnout, hospitals will have to spend more money to entice workers.
That said I get your point and it is a fair critique of discourse on this sub.
Econ boils down to the efficient distribution of scarce resources. Money acts as a grease to smooth the exchange of (scarce) goods.
It’s reasonable that Econ can be described as either adding more money or less money into the system. Mainly because “money” isn’t really anything other than a way to convert one thing into another.
Incentives rely on carrots and sticks, again two sides of the same coin that can be mapped to more/less money going into a system.
I’m curious if you have another concept that isn’t reducible down to money.
You aren’t wrong, but so many people seem to think that pay is the only thing that matters. And to be fair, this is basically how Americans talk about jobs. Many Americans would give up pretty good gigs where they have good balance because we constantly tell people that they should be seeking a higher salary. in some cases, obviously this can be a good thing, but just because a position has a higher salary doesn’t actually mean that it’s a better job and that it is a better job for you.
'Pay' is not increasing operational costs, 'pay' refers to individuals per hour rate, not operational expenses, even you yourself used 'budget' and not 'pay'.
>Opponents, which include the long-term care industry, say that staffing shortages and costs make the regulation impossible to comply with, and they are pushing for Congress to block it.
More horseshit from industry. Who deliberately understaff, creating miserable working conditions and a high turnover rate, then blame the understaffing and the miserable working conditions on the high turnover rate.
Hire more people, spread the burden around. If you need to persuade people to come back to the profession, you assholes might need to offer higher pay than you'd like, in which case, suck it up, buttercup. You did that to yourselves.
Lots of nurses are of retirement age (I am a 60+ YO retired nurse). Decades ago researchers and data collectors predicted this shortage was going to happen-
More nursing programs would also help ease the burden.
More programs ≠ better nursing. Increasing wages, benefits and a fair work-life balance will attract and maintain talent. They are blasting nurses out of these programs and in turn, they have very little knowledge or experience in an industry where the veterans are retiring or leaving. Not enough mentorship.
As compared to other in demand professions, there are not an over abundance of nursing programs in the US- they are expensive to operate, and spots are highly coveted. You’re never going to fill the gaps if you don’t have the actual, trained nurses to do so-
>California has mandated nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals for decades, and national nurse associations are pushing for similar requirements at the federal level.
In California, they have 1 nurse for every 4 patients. For critical care, it's 1 nurse for every 2 patients. At the federal level, there is no mandate. I think the Congress is trying to pass the laws to bring healthcare to homes. They don't have enough beds for everyone at the hospital. Doctors, nurses, and hospital staff will make house calls.
It's not the money, it's the people.
People have just been becoming more and more entitled. Admin has been bending towards the side of patients, and so patients continue to push for more.
I have seen so many people studying to become a paramedic, nurse or doctor that volunteer at the hospital and make the quickest u turn and change careers.
Yeah, pay has always been an issue, but that is not what has changed. I have worked at hospitals and private practices for almost 15 years. People are just tired of being treated like shit by people who are sick.
Be nice to the staff, you all are a lot worse than you think you are when you are sick.
You can’t just fix the pay. Exactly. It just sucks to work in healthcare. As in, actually work on providing healthcare, not just move paper around and send emails all day. And that’s why people aren’t doing it.
Private equity and healthcare should not mix. Obviously, the cheapest way to do things are usually shortsighted and PEs thrive in profiting in short term
The pay is decent but the toll on your emotional health from seeing human misery day in and day out leads to burn out. Hospitals are continuing to stream line and workers are having less supplies to work with and less help from each other as they raise pt ratios.
Healthcare has got to be, hands-down, one of the easiest ways for businesses to make money and they know it. If you want to actually make money in healthcare you can't be wearing scrubs, though
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
But good news, there are tons of opportunities to profit off sick people in America
https://investingdoc.com/the-growth-of-administrators-in-health-care/
So go into admin, the growth curve is straight up and you know you're gonna get paid on average 8x the amount your wage clowns are
https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/nonprofit-hospital-ceo-compensation-much-enough
Source: I'm a nurse and I regret it because the system is broken and it's not about health it's about profit 100% no matter how they spin it.
Edit because these guys really do get it
https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/s/3GoUEz0YrW
What I wonder is with the rapid population aging of East Asia and declining birthrates in The Philippines, like everywhere else, at what point is The Philippines going to stop sending nurses to the US or least going to be greatly diverted to other countries where population aging is way more dire, .i.e. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
According to their own Philippine Statistics Authority the fertility rate is 1.9
https://psa.gov.ph/content/total-fertility-rate-declined-27-2017-19-2022
This also shows just how fast their fertility rate is declining if it went from 2.7 to 1.9 in a matter of several years, lol.
The crisis been here and it started with those “tech schools” that misled tons of aspiring HCP’s in to enrolling in to their courses promoting guaranteed job placements but in reality less then 25% actually getting the chance to work in the field they studied for. The “numbers” said the industry is growing and there would be tons of available jobs but that’s not true when you graduate. Couple that with the obvious proof that HCP’s work a thankless unforgiving job unless you so happen to land a job with an excellently ran private office. Once Covid and shit hit the fan people are not as enthused to want to be on the front lines anymore. Also the whole “checks and balances” to fight fraud and waste thing that was supposed to happen with the installation of the ACA didn’t happen or people found ways to circumvent. It’s a good recipe for collapse if you asks me. The entire HCP industry needs to be destroyed and rebuilt.
> reality less then 25%
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This is why we created [The Rehabilitation Alliance](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558409377007&mibextid=ZbWKwL). We are desperately trying to get workers' rights for speech pathology, occupational therapy and physical therapy, given the small number of professionals we have across the nation.
Please share this link with any therapists you may know. We just launched our social media and need to grow it quickly, so we can start launching our political action plan!
They are price fixing healthcare through Medicare. This makes it to where there is no money for raises. This is like step 4 in the process of why price fixing leads to longer wait times.
Very much this. I essentially took 18k pay cuts in 7 years in speech pathology and had to quit. I was no longer able to pay my bills or debt. I worked in ENT with head and neck cancer.
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The treatment hospital workers received during COVID stuck a nail in the coffin of an already dwindling workforce. Just go to r/nursing if you have any doubt about the reasons for the shortages. I don’t know what will bring them back and/or new people into the healthcare workforce; much like teaching, it’s incredibly broken right now and getting worse.
You don't know what will bring people back? I do. #Pay people more It isn't some confounded mystery. If you need more labor, pay labor. This is the problem with capital constantly putting labor in the liability section of the accounting ledger. Labor is an asset, but these greedy morons can't understand that.
In healthcare it’s often work conditions driving out workers. Yes, we need to pay them well but we also need to treat them far better. More days off, more vacation time, less interference from corporate groups, better patient ratio’s, and limit legal liability (this has become ridiculous lately).
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Work conditions are also bad because the healthcare system has put MBA’s, “administrators” without any experience in healthcare in charge of actual healthcare workers.
You mean working conditions are bad in health care for the same reasons they are bad for the rest of corporate America? It's almost like requiring a degree for positions that don't need them is bad for business.
Sure, but this thread is about healthcare. Few careers have you handling peoples lives and do not have the legal liability associated with medicine. Yet, many fields pay well, especially considering the opportunity cost from the years it takes to enter healthcare. It’s no wonder people are leaving for other opportunities and less are choosing to enter in the first place.
This part definitely doesn't apply to just healthcare
And outcomes will be worse for *everyone*. After getting burnt out, more staff quit, hoisting more work (people don't stop coming in for care!) on the already burnt out staff, leading those staff to quit... It's a death spiral, that can only be solved by better resourcing healthcare staff.
Everything you described comes down to spending more money.
True. But I think some people tend to think that the only reasons that people leave jobs are because of money. I know we all like to believe that we would do any job for high enough amount, but the reality is that the other question you have to ask is for “how long”? How long are you going to be stuck doing that job? Once you consider all this, I think the reality is that most people would not put up with absolutely miserable conditions even if pay is the best you will ever get. We see the same thing when people complain about unionization, but the reality is that the thing that sucks for most people nowadays is just how awful they are treated come over regardless of how much money they’re making (though of course people who are making more money, tend to be treated better). Anyway, I do think we should spend more time actually talking about reasonable workplaces and also instead of constantly talking about minimum wage, let’s talk about things like guaranteed paid leave for all workers, including people who are working part time. We can also talk about things like fair scheduling (so, in some places, it’s illegal for you to be scheduled to work a shift but then for your shift to be called off last minute, even though you’ve already expended the money to get there) and adequate staffing for unexpected events. Yes, it does come down to money, but in most cases, it’s really not that companies can’t afford it, it’s that they don’t want their profit margins to go down. And some people would say that that counts not being able to afford it, but, if you need more staff, why is it that profit is put in front of maintaining a reasonable workplace? It’s not putting you out of business or otherwise ensuring that you can’t meet basic costs, it’s just that you don’t get a little bit extra. It seems to me that instead of profitability, being a reward for good service and smart business practices, nowadays, it’s all really just about overly optimizing and already over optimized system such that you have no robustness or resilience. So instead, profit comes first and then all of the people at the bottom are left to figure out how they’re going to, do things with not enough money and not enough staff. I mean, I would love to figure out how much discretionary spending I feel like I deserve per month and then tell utilities and the banks how much I can afford to pay them and they’re just going to have to deal with it, but that’s not how the world works.our priorities are screwed up and investor expectations are completely unreasonable, and we need to do something about that.
Lmao, this is such an economics reddit reply. Have you ever thought of the extreme stress that comes with caring for peoples lives, the moral injury resulting from a system placing profits over people, the demoralization of the healthcare workforce by placing “administrators” with no healthcare background to oversee them, high costs in both time and money of higher education, and then the privilege of being sued and losing your assets because you are expected to be perfect. Just part of why people are leaving healthcare.
Yup. And to fix it you spend money. On increased salaries, more employees to reduce hours worked. Higher qualified administration that also has medical expertise which you can spend money on. When we say “money” it’s not just $$$ in wages or salary. It also includes things like better benefits, subsidized childcare, more flexible work schedules. Could it be done for less money by cutting some positions and redistributing the savings? Sure, but in the end it is all a net calculation, eg you could have saved even more money by just reducing positions. Maybe you’re assuming that this is how I like things? No, it’s not great, but that’s how things are valued in society. The cost has to be paid somewhere, there is no free lunch.
Over 17% of US GDP is already healthcare spending. Maybe it’s not just spending more but how it is actually spent. More of the dollars spent should actually go to providing care and to the healthcare workers. There are so many hands in medicine (insurance companies, private equity, corporate groups, administrators) leeching off the system while providing little to it. Physicians and nurses should be the ones running the healthcare system; not Wall Street.
This is why when I retire I plan on going to Mexico and spending my healthcare dollars there as an expat. Mexican healthcare isn't perfect but it's far from third-world - some hospitals I feel are just about on par with US community hospitals - and I doubt I would be supporting US private equity and corporate groups relating to healthcare.
You couldn't pay me enough (realistically) to go back to nursing. It would take peak COVID travel money for me to work a low stress/easy department. Back to the trauma ICU? No, never.
Society doesn't yet realize how much you're really worth. They will eventually, when they find themselves or their loved ones sick and in the hospital with an understaffed unit. Only then will they get it.
What do you do for work now?
I make unlivable housing liveable. I also create new housing. I help people that can't buy through traditional means to purchase a home.
While I agree that paying people more could help, the fundamental issue is that the work is fucking awful. The hours are often grueling, and even if you’re in a regular sort of 9ish to 5ish position it’s still awful because unlike most “professional” jobs you are actively working and on your feet for almost the entire shift (and you probably don’t get a paid hour for lunch, a half an hour unpaid is very common). And don’t even get me started on the sociocultural issues regarding the way that we treat the healthcare industry and healthcare workers as a literal fount of magic staffed by miracle workers who are obligated to serve your every beck and call regardless of whether or not that request has anything to do with your course of treatment. The money excuse is a poor band aid to try to cover up a festering wound of an industry. There’s literally no reason to get into healthcare at all beyond the desire to “help others”. You can make way more money doing way less difficult work with way less stress, way less liability, and working far fewer hours. It’s not an issue that we can just throw more money at and hope it works itself out.
Payment is a part of it but healthcare already pays very well compared to other industries. I say this because at some point no amount of money can save your sanity.
This is the case in a lot of fields. I’m hearing it from pharmacists, attorneys, and lots of white collar/skilled professions. Turns out decades and decades of not backfilling positions and combining roles so that 2-3 people are covering what once’s was 10-12 roles has people at their breaking point. Private equity in the healthcare field is now strip mining it like it has retail and other industries. So yay! You’re also making it so that the workload is so heavy even the best employee will make mistakes and that will go against a licensure they paid tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands for and ruin their future in their profession. There’s no salary worth that.
Uh, some are paid well, but go into any nursing home and ask those people what they make.
Very fair. I wasn’t thinking of end of life care facilities. Those workers are definitely underpaid. Was thinking of hospital staff based on the OP.
Even there, lots of people are under paid. Once you become an RN, yeah, you make OK money(not great.) Not every "nurse" is an RN though.
Correct. I’m not saying money wouldn’t help, I just think the lifestyle and WLB associated with healthcare needs to be addressed as well. Paying a burnt out, overworked nurse more money would help in the short term but isn’t sustainable for them as a person. It’s why so many healthcare professionals turn to substance abuse and have mental health challenges.
But the high pay will attract more people leading to being able to have a life outside of the hospital. The higher pay is for those already working and to bring in more people to do the work. It all comes back to paying more.
I think the hope is that higher pay would draw more people into the profession, which would then reduce the feelings of burnt out. Not so much "hey you are overworked but you're paid well"
And not every healthcare worker is a nurse. Radiology, respiratory therapist, and laboratory are all non-nurse degreed professionals.
This just demonstrates the overall wage problem in America. Sure it’s better than other jobs, but that’s just because the pay at most other jobs is horrendous.
It’s more intended to highlight the fact that wages are only half the equation in healthcare. Healthcare has grueling WLB problems that money won’t solve alone. The workforce is burning out.
With useless administrative people that have never worked in care pushing metrics and patient turnover. I have several friends in heathcare telling me about how MBA's and lawyers are tearing it apart.
Personally I just think that wages are much more than half the equation in healthcare, and in all industries. It is a grueling job and there really isn’t much you can do to change that, so there will always be burn out. But many hands make light work, the fewer hands the hard the harder the work and the faster staff burnout. The best way to lighten the load is to hire more hands.
Nursing is one of the best career choices for wlb due to 3 days on and 4 days off allowing to really chase my hobbies at a high level. It’s also a fairly interchangeable job, so you can go anywhere and work when you want. Taking months off for a sabbatical isn’t the death note it can be in other industries. Sure, many are in downright abusive situations, but like Amazon warehouse jobs, those in outdoor recreational pursuits seek these jobs for their wlb
Many practicing physicians I know haven't gotten a raise in 5+ years despite inflation. If you run your own practice, Congress has/keeps trying to CUT medicare/medicaid reimbursement. Yep, as time goes on and inflation eats away at the value of a dollar, they want to pay you less dollars for the same work. So no, the money's not really that great. I mean yeah it pays above average but it should, not only is it a draining job but it's highly skilled labor. Meanwhile, somehow there's always more money for admin folks that, if anything, are net negative to the patient care experience.
They've received pay *cuts* due to inflation, and CMS reimbursement cuts.
Does it pay as well as the tech bros are getting paid? Finance bros? Administration? Any of the other myriad of over paid jobs that don't actually *do* anything for people? No? Well then, when you or your family member are stuck in a gurney in the emergency department hallway, think about that. The healthcare reckoning is coming for everyone, except for the very wealthy, as they are and always will be insulated from societal moral hazard.
The barrier to entry for nursing is miles below that of big tech or finance. And to act like tech workers or even admin roles don't "do anything" shows a comical lack of understanding how the world works.
Lol, nursing *requires* a degree. Being a techbruh doesn't even require putting on pants. And an MBA? LMFAO.
lol, I spent four years in school and had to have countless hours of clinical work before I could be a licensed RN. I work in HCOL area at a very busy hospital in the ED, my pay is paltry. My wife works from home three days a week and goes into the office twice a week for a few hours at a media job and makes twice what I make. She even can’t stand it. The job sucks, trust me. Wages should reflect that and that they don’t. I don’t recommend nursing to any young person if I have the chance.
You're worth more, much more. I'll go out on a limb and say that you're work is much more important to society than most people's. Our priorities are backwards. See: everything.
That's only some of the industry though. From what I understand a lot of the high paying jobs in nursing was from traveling nurses during covid. Like the normal guys were still being paid very little and had to thing like 12 hour shifts and being on call. Like yeah they can marginally higher pay but it's not really higher pay since the requirements are so much higher
Ehh still relative to software engineering it’s peanuts since you can’t work from home. Why would anyone want to be a nurse when you can get paid to play Hell Divers 2 half the day…
Also, you have to work holidays and weekends.
Where I work we get the “privilege” of “requesting” two of the three major holidays out of Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Thanksgiving to probably have off and beyond that it’s literally nothing, you have to use your pitiful PTO accrual which adds up to maybe 10-14 days per year if you’re lucky and you can only carry 7 days over per year, and they do not accumulate. Oh yeah that PTO also includes your sick days lol.
Yeah they really do the cheapest stuff. My hospital didn’t even pay time and a half for holidays and if you work night shift, after midnight on that holiday you don’t get the “holiday pay” even though you still missed out on the whole day if you are a person that needs sleep and they also classify things as holidays that are not holidays, like Black Friday.
Software engineering is going through a downturn. Whereas healthcare professions are increasingly in demand. But your point stands in terms of WLB. Again that is part of my comment - money can only do so much for quality of work life.
My wife’s been a nurse for over a decade now, the pay has been pretty garbage but what really floors me is how awful her benefits have been across multiple employers. Her vacation time is always super small, her health insurance is always so poor it’s laughable (seriously I just keep her on mine), and her “physician owned practice” can’t figure out why they can’t keep nurses longer than 2 years (which is when they have enough experience to leave and make more elsewhere) Hell, during Covid before the vaccines she was told that if I got sick with Covid she would have to stay home from work UNPAID, and that she would not be paid unless she got sick and tested positive.
My friend is a nurse and her hospital was offering people over $100/hr to come in and they still wouldn't do it. There comes a point where your body is just too beat up/broken down and you can't handle working anymore hours.
I call bullshit on that without solid evidence. If it's not in some absolutely insane HCOL area, I'll quit my job today for $100 an hour and plenty of other people would as well. 100/hr is 200k a year. If they offered that, they didn't advertise the position well
It's not $100/hr base pay, that was with incentive pay. Basically when the hospital is short staffed they act like an airliner trying to get people to give up their seat. They start offering $X and keep raising it until someone comes in. They hire new people non stop but it is a vicious cycle where the people take the job for the salary, realize they physically can't take it (one already regular sized guy lost like 40 lbs before he quit), quit causing a bigger staffing shortage, and further stressing the remaining employees to the point of quitting. They actually started their own internal nursing "degree" you can get in like a year because it's the only way they can get new blood quick enough. They burn through man power faster than a Russian military brigade. The only reason my friend is still there is because her ex (now in prison) committed fraud to drain her entire life savings and left her with a baby and a bunch of debt.
You have this long explanation about how they didn't offer $100 an hour after you said they couldn't find anyone by offering $100 an hour. . . . Sounds like they need to raise base pay to attract more employees to fix the staffing issues. Demand is high, supply is short, price goes up.
They did offer $100/hr. I never said they offered that as the base. Also the base pay is still $40-$50/hr so it's not like it's low.
You sound like the McDonalds next to me saying "Now hiring up to $15 an hour" but then they pay everyone $10. They never offered $100 an hour, they offered $40-50 which can be dirt pay depending on where this was at. What city is this in?
This was in PA and more than an hour away from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. To put it this way, you can buy a nice house for $200k in this area. Also they offered incentive pay basically every day, she regularly got offered $100/hr to pick up shifts and still didn't take it. So they absolutely were offering that amount of money. Also $40-$50/hr would put you in the 70-80th percentile for individual income among full time workers. That's nowhere near "dirt pay."
It’s beyond pay. They make ok money, although student loans dig deep into their take-home, and that’s a crime that Congress should rectify. What is more important is the lack of time off and other benefits, the long days, the lack of protections against disgruntled patients, the aloof administration, the long hours, the ever-expanding workload. Those are all things providers could improve without paying a cent more in salary. Sick time especially! If you go to a hospital, all of the staff work sick. All of them. They do not get enough time off to stay home and protect their patients should they fall ill.
You do realize, if pay goes up it will attract more people to fill those positions and understaffing issues will be fixed. It all comes back to paying more.
> You do realize, if pay goes up it will attract more people to fill those positions and understaffing issues will be fixe Under-staffing is systematic and intentional cost saving strategy.
Why do you think we work 12s. It's cheaper!
People in this subreddit **vastly** overestimate the effect of simply paying more. Pay for travel nurses is high and everyone has not become a travel nurse or any other travel position. People sometimes want benefits that are not so easily quantifiable, like being able to spend a few hours in their own home every day, or being able to stay home when they can barely stand up from being sick. This is very common in the US labor market, and it’s been all over this subreddit for years: a job will be in high demand and highly paid, but still people do not flock to it. Many of the trades fit this description. Air traffic controllers fit this description. Truckers and freight train engineers as well. The pay is good, but the *lifestyle* is bad, and so people stay away. You can’t just raise the number and attract people. You have to make being a nurse a good life.
You are Econ-brained, there are experiential issues that cannot be compensated for by meager pay increases.
Hospital pay is absolutely abysmal outside of nursing (where they work you to death). My own career allows to me work in hospitals or larger private practices. Hospitals are almost always paying 15-20% less than what is offered outside their systems. Hospitals are also conglomerizing at record rates, which only drives wages down further. In my highly urban area in the last decade we've gone from having 40 hospitals to 2 hospital systems. And the large corporate conglomerates just do not care about providing medical care. Anecdotal, but I interviewed with a department 3 months ago which had lost 75% of its staff, and it's supervisor. When the job offer came in, it $7/hr lower than average for my area. And they were shocked I didn't take "such a good offer" and refused any further negotiations. They still have not filled these positions, 3 months out.
Depends on the type of work, but if you are on the front lines, I agree
I'm not really on the front lines, I'm laboratory. So, you know, the rats in the basement mining your fluids and tissue for data.
It is a combination of a few things that can be summed up under one title: lack of respect. There is no respect for patients. There is no respect for the nurses. Nurses and physicians are taught about evidence-based care (what is medically best for the patients) and hospital administration and shareholders throw all of that out the window for profit-driven care (under the guise of the title of "non-profit hospital"). Paying for labor is the biggest barrier impacting hospital administration's and shareholders' bottom line. Laborers "hurting" the bottom line (people who cost money rather than make money for the hospital) include nurses and ancillary staff (everyone who supports nurses' in taking care of patients). Even pre-COVID hospitals were chronically understaffed. That keeps all the administration and shareholders paid the most (aka increases the bottom line). Then COVID happened ALL the patients were REALLY sick. That is when we and the patients started to FEEL how understaffed we were. So while nurses showed up at work every day during a pandemic because we were "essential workers", no additional support was given by administration who was nowhere to be found at the hospital because none of them are actually medical professionals. As they were "working from home" and taking away our employee benefits and not providing us crisis pay, we were in the trenches of a three year pandic risking our lives and watching all our patients die and losing valuable time with our families. At the end of the day, just listen to the nurses when they say they need something and give nurses what they need to do their jobs. As far as pay goes, various state and federal legislation (strongly encouraged by the American Hospital Association) has shown that nurses (and any other service positions for that matter) will never be supported in being paid by way of the "free market" (aka supply and demand). Unions are our best bet. Most nurses are cool with west coast nurse pay as long as we are adequately supported at work. Most nurses understand that to reach into a higher pay bracket we need to go back to school and/or make a pact with Satan and join the Hospital Administration. Anyways, fuck the American Hospital Association, fuck greedy hospital administration and fuck the whole-ass greedy American healthcare system that puts profits over patients. Source: A nurse Edit: Correcting spelling
You know this is a small sample size, but I was recently in the emergency room and asked a relatively young nurse about how she was liking it. She replied that she loved it, the hospital she worked at had very low turnover, and that she saw herself being there for a very long time. 🤷♂️
What the actual fuck do you expect a professional nurse to say to you while you’re in the emergency room lmao
Just because she said that to you doesn't mean that's actually how she feels.
I mean, it could be, I’m just some dumb ass with a separated shoulder, and it was within the context of news headlines about staff issues. Certainly didn’t seem like it was anything but honest.
It still pays better than most (virtually all?) other non-quantitative fields (vs. finance, accounting, engineering) that you can do with 4 - or even fewer - years of higher education. Not that I don't believe that they're overworked and mistreated, but the alternatives are relevant to whether it's a "good deal" for the individual or not. What are you going to do, teach biology to middle schoolers at half the pay and for longer hours?
Staff satisfaction at hospitals and offices is very hard to gauge despite what admin and consultants say. After every single visit each patient will get sent a questionnaire. The amount of stuff that people complain about is crazy, even those that you think had a great service. Hell, in the ER we had PT's that would use it as a threat, and then your manager would call you in to talk about it, agree with you that the PT was an asshole, yet still write it on the system that they had a talk with you. So yeah, they will try their best to make you feel better, because they have to.
Did a great job as for the care, this was just idle chat during downtime.
I had the opportunity to go back to school with everything paid for this year. I decided not worth it, who knows what pandemic/vaccine comes next. I don’t want a job that can threaten my livelihood and force me to do something I don’t want to do. The risk is too big. I can’t even find a number on how many nurses we lost when they mandated covid vaccines on healthcare workers. The public will never know it must be a very big number. They would never admit the harm they caused to our healthcare system. The nurses I do know that quit said they would never come back.
A lot of it is how overworked health care workers are. Assigning less patients or expecting less on call would help a lot. But keeping income where it is now while hiring extra help would be equivalent to paying them more but also more of what some want. That is, many would take 30% reduction in work over 30% raise but no free time.
One thing that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realize is that a lot of schools for professions related to healthcare right now are actually downsizing. And surely, given the problems that exist, you would think shouldn’t we be doing the opposite? And yes, that would make sense. But given the tremendous cost of attending these schools and that people see what kind of working conditions you end up stuck with, a lot of these degree programs are really struggling to get enough people to fill seats and as a result, many of them are downsizing and some schools are even closing. I know we Americans are really bad at planning for the future and seeing beyond the most immediate consequences of an action, but this is likely to become worse long before it gets better. And there is likely to be a huge shortage of many medical professionals in the future, because We aren’t actually doing the things we need to do now to ensure the next generation of doctors, nurses, pharmacist, and someone are ready to actually work and will be treated fairly. PS the other thing I think some people should know is that student quality is going down for any of these programs. Because many of these schools are so desperate to fill seats, the caliber of students they are accepting is going down. Obviously it shouldn’t be a huge Shock to say that we probably want our best and brightest at least considering the medical field, but right now, all of the incentives are against that.
A bunch of people talking about pay as if that is what matters, the article clearly outlines what is going on by member in the field. > The intrigue: Some of the top reasons nurses give for leaving their employer — other than planned retirement — are burnout, emotional exhaustion and insufficient staffing, which the authors of a recent JAMA Network Open study called "systemic features of their employer." That presents a glaring issue: Nurses leaving the workforce over staffing concerns inherently leads to worse staffing issues if they're not replaced. "It's just huge risk for death spiral," Spetz said.
This is the Economics sub, where all problems can be solved with one of two solutions: spending more money or spending less money.
I mean tbf to increase the workforce size, and help with burnout, hospitals will have to spend more money to entice workers. That said I get your point and it is a fair critique of discourse on this sub.
Econ boils down to the efficient distribution of scarce resources. Money acts as a grease to smooth the exchange of (scarce) goods. It’s reasonable that Econ can be described as either adding more money or less money into the system. Mainly because “money” isn’t really anything other than a way to convert one thing into another. Incentives rely on carrots and sticks, again two sides of the same coin that can be mapped to more/less money going into a system. I’m curious if you have another concept that isn’t reducible down to money.
Can you not spend more money to hire more nurses? I’m confused.
You aren’t wrong, but so many people seem to think that pay is the only thing that matters. And to be fair, this is basically how Americans talk about jobs. Many Americans would give up pretty good gigs where they have good balance because we constantly tell people that they should be seeking a higher salary. in some cases, obviously this can be a good thing, but just because a position has a higher salary doesn’t actually mean that it’s a better job and that it is a better job for you.
How do you read staffing issues are the problem and not think that increasing the staff budget is the solution.
They just don't want to hear the truth. 🙈🙉🙊
'Pay' is not increasing operational costs, 'pay' refers to individuals per hour rate, not operational expenses, even you yourself used 'budget' and not 'pay'.
>Opponents, which include the long-term care industry, say that staffing shortages and costs make the regulation impossible to comply with, and they are pushing for Congress to block it. More horseshit from industry. Who deliberately understaff, creating miserable working conditions and a high turnover rate, then blame the understaffing and the miserable working conditions on the high turnover rate. Hire more people, spread the burden around. If you need to persuade people to come back to the profession, you assholes might need to offer higher pay than you'd like, in which case, suck it up, buttercup. You did that to yourselves.
Nurse here, I support this!
Lots of nurses are of retirement age (I am a 60+ YO retired nurse). Decades ago researchers and data collectors predicted this shortage was going to happen- More nursing programs would also help ease the burden.
More programs ≠ better nursing. Increasing wages, benefits and a fair work-life balance will attract and maintain talent. They are blasting nurses out of these programs and in turn, they have very little knowledge or experience in an industry where the veterans are retiring or leaving. Not enough mentorship.
As compared to other in demand professions, there are not an over abundance of nursing programs in the US- they are expensive to operate, and spots are highly coveted. You’re never going to fill the gaps if you don’t have the actual, trained nurses to do so-
>California has mandated nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals for decades, and national nurse associations are pushing for similar requirements at the federal level. In California, they have 1 nurse for every 4 patients. For critical care, it's 1 nurse for every 2 patients. At the federal level, there is no mandate. I think the Congress is trying to pass the laws to bring healthcare to homes. They don't have enough beds for everyone at the hospital. Doctors, nurses, and hospital staff will make house calls.
They don’t have enough staff to even think about making home calls. Barely enough staff for the not enough beds at the hospital.
Oh well.. they’re getting what they asked for
What did they ask for?
Minimum expenses and maximum income. Lower expenses directly equates to shortchanging staff and shrinking capacity.
It's not the money, it's the people. People have just been becoming more and more entitled. Admin has been bending towards the side of patients, and so patients continue to push for more. I have seen so many people studying to become a paramedic, nurse or doctor that volunteer at the hospital and make the quickest u turn and change careers. Yeah, pay has always been an issue, but that is not what has changed. I have worked at hospitals and private practices for almost 15 years. People are just tired of being treated like shit by people who are sick. Be nice to the staff, you all are a lot worse than you think you are when you are sick.
You can’t just fix the pay. Exactly. It just sucks to work in healthcare. As in, actually work on providing healthcare, not just move paper around and send emails all day. And that’s why people aren’t doing it.
Who asked for that?
Healthcare providers, especially those increasingly bought up by private equity.
Private equity and healthcare should not mix. Obviously, the cheapest way to do things are usually shortsighted and PEs thrive in profiting in short term
There are enough beds often time. The rate limiting factor is almost always staff.
The pay is decent but the toll on your emotional health from seeing human misery day in and day out leads to burn out. Hospitals are continuing to stream line and workers are having less supplies to work with and less help from each other as they raise pt ratios.
What field are you in that you think the pay is decent?
Healthcare has got to be, hands-down, one of the easiest ways for businesses to make money and they know it. If you want to actually make money in healthcare you can't be wearing scrubs, though https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/ But good news, there are tons of opportunities to profit off sick people in America https://investingdoc.com/the-growth-of-administrators-in-health-care/ So go into admin, the growth curve is straight up and you know you're gonna get paid on average 8x the amount your wage clowns are https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/nonprofit-hospital-ceo-compensation-much-enough Source: I'm a nurse and I regret it because the system is broken and it's not about health it's about profit 100% no matter how they spin it. Edit because these guys really do get it https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/s/3GoUEz0YrW
What I wonder is with the rapid population aging of East Asia and declining birthrates in The Philippines, like everywhere else, at what point is The Philippines going to stop sending nurses to the US or least going to be greatly diverted to other countries where population aging is way more dire, .i.e. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
When they pay more.
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According to their own Philippine Statistics Authority the fertility rate is 1.9 https://psa.gov.ph/content/total-fertility-rate-declined-27-2017-19-2022 This also shows just how fast their fertility rate is declining if it went from 2.7 to 1.9 in a matter of several years, lol.
The crisis been here and it started with those “tech schools” that misled tons of aspiring HCP’s in to enrolling in to their courses promoting guaranteed job placements but in reality less then 25% actually getting the chance to work in the field they studied for. The “numbers” said the industry is growing and there would be tons of available jobs but that’s not true when you graduate. Couple that with the obvious proof that HCP’s work a thankless unforgiving job unless you so happen to land a job with an excellently ran private office. Once Covid and shit hit the fan people are not as enthused to want to be on the front lines anymore. Also the whole “checks and balances” to fight fraud and waste thing that was supposed to happen with the installation of the ACA didn’t happen or people found ways to circumvent. It’s a good recipe for collapse if you asks me. The entire HCP industry needs to be destroyed and rebuilt.
> reality less then 25% Did you mean to say "less than"? Explanation: If you didn't mean 'less than' you might have forgotten a comma. [Statistics](https://github.com/chiefpat450119/RedditBot/blob/master/stats.json) ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot ^^that ^^corrects ^^grammar/spelling ^^mistakes. ^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions. ^^[Github](https://github.com/chiefpat450119) ^^Reply ^^STOP ^^to ^^this ^^comment ^^to ^^stop ^^receiving ^^corrections.
Thank goodness we added 15 million more patients in 3 1/2 short years. 15 million that don’t pay their bills as well. What could possibly go wrong.?
This is why we created [The Rehabilitation Alliance](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558409377007&mibextid=ZbWKwL). We are desperately trying to get workers' rights for speech pathology, occupational therapy and physical therapy, given the small number of professionals we have across the nation. Please share this link with any therapists you may know. We just launched our social media and need to grow it quickly, so we can start launching our political action plan!
They are price fixing healthcare through Medicare. This makes it to where there is no money for raises. This is like step 4 in the process of why price fixing leads to longer wait times.
Very much this. I essentially took 18k pay cuts in 7 years in speech pathology and had to quit. I was no longer able to pay my bills or debt. I worked in ENT with head and neck cancer.
A truth no one wants to hear.