Isn't the solution simple? Pay nurses like 80%-100% of what traveling nurses make, instead of 50% or less.
The hospital my wife worked in merged into a big network and gave every RN a 25% haircut, and laid off a few key departments (ER most notably), replacing them with travel nurses and a contracted medical practice. A few exceptions were made in high margin lines if business.
Net result? Care sucks, finances are green. They purged the mid-career people and now have a young and dumb workforce. There was a particular emphasis on hiring military wives as they are transient. The key thing is to stave off unions.
Like any other consulting thing, they eventually purge the hired guns. The traveling nurse boom is a COVID thing. As COVID wanes, these folks will be back in the meatgrinder.
Feels similar to how every company seems to want senior developer talent, but few will pay for training new senior talent.
The inflated cost of traveling nurses is used in negotiating new contracts.
Frankly if American workers want better, they need to realize supply and demand applies to labor.
There’s no reason a surgeon should have a Ferrari while the nursing staff that supports them makes $70k year.
It’s highly skilled labor but also, imo, artificially constrained by our educational funding choices.
All of which is politically babysat to be just so according to well paid economists who are trotted out to tell us inequality is normal because that’s how it’s always been.
Americans made kings and robber barons again and just changed the words. Meanwhile petty crime is high treason.
Human society as we know it was set on this path by forever lifers. The end game is the end times. They don’t care if anyone survives, no one will be around to complain.
Drop the worker euphemisms and call everyone people. This arbitrary taxonomy to satisfy political sorting is inhuman.
Hospitals are often run inefficiently [1]. This leads to a lot of overhead costs. Many procedures in hospitals loose money for hospitals while others make money. Taking care of COVID patients typically looses a hospital money. So, where does the money come from to pay nurses more when much of their work is on patients they loose money on?
[1] https://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-prescrip...
In my previous job, a lonnnnnnnnnnnnng list of items were pending, because they didn't have enough people to work on them. The mobile app hadn't been updated in 3 years, not even the bugs were fixed. And still the company was one of the most boring places I've worked, with meeting after meeting after meeting...
How hard can it be to have individual conversations with employees once a quarter or something, pay them decent, and at least try to help them do their jobs better? All of which will result in more revenue for the company, no?
I had a chat with a recruiter who argued that remote workers should be paid less. Shouldn't they be paid more (or at least the same as in-office workers for the same work) because the company is saving money on office space, electricity, internet and even stupid coffee and toilet paper? If the recruiter opens the conversation that remote workers are worth less, then how do they expect the candidates to take them seriously? This is just one example.
I just don't get it. Maybe I am not management material/
It can be very difficult when the management and executive classes tend to self-select for sociopathic traits.
I don't know a single friend at this point on a fully staffed team in any field anywhere. Whether it be FAANG, startups, or the government, data analytics in retail or lawyers at law firms, there is massive churn everywhere.
Fully staffed or not people who see themselves as long term employees with skin in the game or as providing a service to their community will be resistant to implementing policies that screw the customer and will help customers ask for the things they need to ask for to not get screwed. Employees who see themselves as transient more readily implement whatever management asks without thinking.
I would have thought that transients would be less likely to do that as they could more easily take other roles, while embedded people would have more to lose by opposing management. Why companies hire consultants for unpopular changes, as they will be leaving anyway and thus have less to lose.
I am not sure which one is the case.
Hospitals are basically at the "We tried nothing and we are out of ideas!"
The solution to a lot of nurse burnout is really pretty simple, increase their wages, hire more than the minimum of travel nurses so they aren't all working overtime.
Burnout is a psychological factor
Now imagine that because of said crunch they say "Hmm, we need some contractors to speed this up." So they hire just enough to reduce your hours from 80 to 75.
Now imagine how you'd feel learning all those contractors are earning $120k and with your skill set, you could to if you left your employer (because there's a high demand for devs everywhere). Not only that, but you have a lot more flexibility in your hours and no longer need to do 80+ hour weeks.
What would you do?
Wage is a huge factor here and the nurses leaving aren't necessarily leaving nursing but instead turning into travel nurses. This creates the vicious cycle the hospitals are currently experiencing.
Hospitals have 2 levers to pull to fix this problem.
1. Increase wages so less nurses feel inclined to leave for more money. 2. Increase the number of travel nurses so current nurses aren't pressured into insane and demanding work hours.
The lever they are pulling instead, is "hire just enough travel nurses for minimal compliance (maybe) and buy little caesars pizza... maybe. Then complain to media outlets about how lazy nurses are."
The reason hospitals aren't fixing this problem is simple. Once they raise their nurses salaries, they will have a HARD time lowering them again.
At the end of the day burnout still isn’t solved by pay.
This is a really great point! I recently read a pretty good true crime book (cheesy, I know, lol!) about the serial killer nurse Charles Cullen who was a nurse in New Jersey and killed his patients via insulin injections. He killed 40 know and up to 400 patients which makes him one of the most prolific serial killers in history.
What I found interesting and ties right into your comment is that before they were onto him and when his patients kept dying, the hospital managers LOVED HIM because he was very efficient, hit all his KPIs and took on a lot of work. He would ask to help out the other nurses and kill their patients so then it wouldn't get on his record that he was killing his own patients.
It was a pretty interesting but harrowing read if anyone is looking for book recommendations. The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Good-Nurse-Audiobook/B00C9SW5...
Tell me, at the hospital you manage, how’s that policy working out?