>She is a registered nurse, so she can easily get a month off at a time
Tangential, but...a friend of mine is an RN in an ICU who works nights (how he copes with the long hours is beyond me). He's struggled to get a single week off, much less an entire month without quarrel. Turnover is high, they're shortstaffed, etc. What is different about your wife's hospital (maybe there's less pressure and more nurses available in other sections of a hospital)?
> My wife is a nurse. The job sucked before the pandemic. Patients would grope her (geriatric care), family members would berate her. Management never stood up for her. She was overworked because the center wanted to save money by giving less nurses more patients to the point where she couldn’t provide adequate patients care.
That's the beauty of an industry where there's no result-based compensation. Quality can slip and overwork creep in and there's no mechanism to stop it.
> The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary.
Or they're picking up more hours at a different hospital, so there's no overtime but they still make more.
>especially nurses typically do so despite the working conditions.
This mentality is what's being exploited. And nurses are getting fed up.
They want to help people. But so much of the decision making is taking that away from them. Even the simple shit like bathing patients is being rushed or removed from them because they're too busy. Simple things like brushing a person's hair helps humanize them. At a certain point they're so overworked with terrible ratios that they can see all the inevitable near miss scenarios that have almost caused harm to patients or themselves/coworkers and without any support from the system to correct these issues they're giving up.
Again, they want to help, but they also can't repeatedly stand back and watch the train wreck in action. Many of them are saving themselves and exiting the profession because the mental and emotional toll they pay each shift is becoming too much.
My wife is an ICU nurse. Most of what I've said here comes from her, or her colleagues who I talk with.
>flexible hours: full-time, part-time, on-call, and working 40 hours a week in a cubicle gets really old.
Counterpoints (if in the US):
Capitalism is a real thing. If you work in a hospital you will be pushed to the point where things are unsafe for the patient, and if something goes wrong, you will be blamed and lose your license. A culture exists where everyone tries to cover their ass.
If you work as a contractor (i.e. you work for a firm that sends you to different hospitals based on shortages), you will be the first person to be blamed.
Unlike in tech, seniority is the main way to get better salaries and benefits. You won't get too far by performing really well.
The attitudes and behavior of fellow coworkers (nurses and nurse assistants) would be considered quite unprofessional in a typical engineering workplace.
Depending on which unit you work, patients can be horrible. You'll get all kinds of attitudes. Psychopaths, etc.
"James Collins, a research manager in the NIOSH Division of Safety Research, says before studying back injuries among nursing employees, he focused on auto factory workers. His subjects were "93 percent men, heavily tattooed, macho workforce, Harley-Davidson rider type guys," he says. "And they were prohibited from lifting over 35 pounds through the course of their work."
Nursing employees in a typical hospital lift far heavier patients a dozen or more times every day.
"That was my biggest shock and surprise," Collins says. "And the big deal is, the injuries are so severe that for many people, they're career-ending.""
(Experience will vary with what type of nursing you work - some nursing is a lot milder - but pays less).
> The hospital I work for will pay me time and a half to come in after hours and do anything that needs done (moving patients, feeding patients, cleaning rooms), and I'm in IT.
I think it's more along the lines that it's probably cheaper to pay you time and a half given hospital IT pay compared to paying qualified nursing staff to do the same.
> Nursing is in huge demand. That woman most certainly had other options.
Part of the problem is the people creating the contracts are perfectly willing to place the burden on existing nurses and allow patients to suffer. Even when already short staffed, hospitals are not under much pressure to renegotiate a contract.
>1. Many new nurses make the same or more and long time nurses. It's frustrating when the nurse in charge with the most experience is making less than new nurses. Some hospitals are even trying to stop nurses from talking about pay.
I think non-performance-based pay is something endemic to many female-dominated professions.
My wife used to work in childcare, and it did her head in that she was paid less than complete idiots who'd been working there longer than she had.
> Hospitals have made sure they hire JUST ENOUGH nurses to cover shifts and no more.
This is a two-edged sword. If you hire more than you need, the nurses' hours will be cut during normal situations and they won't make enough money. If hospitals don't cut extra hours and instead keep the staff on the clock, a public scandal will erupt surrounding well-paid medical professionals sitting around doing nothing.
>Sounds like there's too much nurses on the market if that's what the job market looks like.
Uhhh... that's a weird take. I already talked about the chronically understaffed units.
The issue is the system doesn't hire enough nurses to cover the needs of our healthcare system. They'd prefer to run understaffed and burn out their workers than hire more nurses and overstaff the units so there's some cushion
> Because you cannot. Even if you have the space and the materials, you do not have the qualified and experienced personel to run it.
Oh yes you do. Absolutely. They're called traveler nurses and there are literally thousands of them out there. Agencies like Krucial Staffing have been hiring hundreds of them at a time and sending them to places like El Paso. Which now has a declining ICU admission rate.
If they said "We need 500 ICU nurses to be in California within 48 hours" they would have them.
Whether or not the big union in California would let this happen, however, is another story in itself.
But yes, you absolutely can get people to staff it.
> 3 or 4 12 hour shifts a week is normal for salaried nurses. $5200/wk isn't. It's over double.
It's a normal shift schedule, and they pay travel nurses much more than staff nurses to work the same shift schedule. These are typically 3 month contracts, but not always.
> I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Yes, it may be a full week of 12 hour shifts, but it's still a much higher pay. And if you get the next week off, it's a fantastic deal.
I don't disagree, but a lot of people do not want to work (or feel like they can't provide good care for) 12 hours every day for a week.
My wife works in postpartum care, and while she usually works 3 12.5 hr shifts per week, if the hospital is going through a busy time it can be more. In addition to her normal scheduled hours, she will have a few on-call shifts per month, and during feb-april (usually the busiest time of year around here) it's pretty much assumed that she'll get called in for these. In addition to the scheduled on-call shifts it's usually not hard to find other times that the hospital is in need.
Of course even at that, I don't think she's ever worked more than like, 60 hrs a week. I can't imagine anyone working 80 hr weeks consistently in nursing. It doesn't even seem safe - nursing is very physically and mentally demanding work, someone consistently overworked is much more likely to make mistakes.
You’re not reading what I’m writing. The fact that you know how long your wife’s shift is supposed to be is my point. The fact that nurses are being paid extra money for extra time is my point.
Engineers in Silicon Valley don’t clock in for a 12 hour shift. They are put on salary and any discussion of schedule is discouraged in favor of talking about “hustle” and “team players.”[1]
My point is not “health care workers don’t work hard.” My point is that they are set up with schedules and structure, which tech companies avoid… and then try to point at health care workers or “contractors” to justify the chaos.
Also I bet your wife is not working so hard just so the hospital can meet its financial goals. If she is like most nurses she is motivated by patient care and probably hates the administration, who are usually seen as bean counters who (if anything) impede care. Again, compare to tech companies who build myths around founders and corporate missions to obscure the purely financial stakes of their work.
[1] I know that not all companies operate this way, not all managers do this, not all engineers experience this. But there is obviously some sort of shared experience among a lot of people that the blog post at the top of the main thread is tapping into.
My eldest just started her career in nursing. They do three 12 hour shifts a week. She's exhausted at the end of the day, but she's loving having four days off each week.
>>why aren’t nurses quitting en masse to become traveling nurses?
because by definition, traveling nurse...travel. Yes you might get a gig for a while in your local hospital, but what happens when that ends? If you are young and/or single and don't own a house or locked into a 12-month lease, sure you can just pickup and move to the next place across the state or across the country - but if you are like most people, perhaps own a home, have a spouse with a local job and perhaps more importantly, kids in a local school system - it is very hard to just keep packing up and moving 2-3 times a year.
Only in a vaccuum. It pays far worse than other jobs at the same rate given the effort and stress the job entails.
> don't they get more leverage on what QOL and wages they can demand ?
Sure, but it needs to get far worse. The hospitals are only going to budge once walkouts are organized. But that can't happen without strong unions, most nurses just need to pay the bills which is why they continue to put up with it.
I'm not sure you understand who has the leverage. The hospitals can let healthcare deteriorate far beyond current expectations. They still get paid in the end. The environment for patients and nurses will only get worse.
> We are going to need thousands and thousands of nurses in the next several decades. They're well-paying jobs that aren't going to be automated away in our lifetimes (a lot of doctors, on the other hand, can probably be replaced by AI). We need nurses, not people with sociology degrees (I say this as someone with a sociology degree).
FWIW a lot of the nurses I know are desperate to get out. One person in particular I know makes ok money but the schedule absolutely destroys them.
Tangential, but...a friend of mine is an RN in an ICU who works nights (how he copes with the long hours is beyond me). He's struggled to get a single week off, much less an entire month without quarrel. Turnover is high, they're shortstaffed, etc. What is different about your wife's hospital (maybe there's less pressure and more nurses available in other sections of a hospital)?
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