Nobody is forcing them to work. My guess is that being massively overpaid for what they do makes it worth it for them, otherwise we would've seen mass walkouts.
Most people aren't solely motivated by greed.
Many nurses have actually had their pay cut during this pandemic and have kept slaving away in garbage bags and cloth masks despite their wholesale mistreatment.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying it's doctors and nurses thinking this way. But a lot of posters on HN certainly are.
The cause of stress among healthcare providers is economic, and so is the solution.
I would never advise my kids to go into a job where a part of your pay is being called a hero. That’s how you get taken advantage of.
This is not wartime. This is a result of MBAs in management running the organization so lean that there is no slack in the system. So you can go ahead and offer your passion, duty, and sacrifice, but someone above you is just going to see it as another place they can save money.
Pretty fucking dismissive of the skilled work that nurses do.
And if society wants people to do work that pretty much everyone doesn’t want to, then they need to offer sufficient pay.
Relying on people’s charity to do their duty in lieu of competitive pay is not a good strategy.
What are they going to do, go to another hospital that is going to treat them the exact same way, taking a huge step backwards in their career progression?
What if there ISN'T another hospital nearby and they do not want to have a massive commute, or worse, uproot their family and move to a new area?
It's much more standard for people to just walk away when the moral stakes are low, like they tend to be in tech. If someone can't log into HN because you walked out, who cares? But just because it's money-or-walk in our industry doesn't mean that's how it is for others.
It’s also a bit rich for people who don’t work these important, getting your hands dirty jobs to judge people walking out on them. It’s society’s moral failing to not properly allocate resources to them.
My GF is in this position right now, where walking out would mean switching industries in a pandemic, because other facilities aren't any better off. She's burnt out as hell, and puts up with an enormous amount of shit to make patients lives better, so I'm sensitive to anything that sounds like "well they had it coming for not walking out."
> It’s society’s moral failing to not properly allocate resources to them.
God damned right.
For example:
https://herald-review.com/news/state-and-regional/workers-go...
>The members of SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana said they were seeking pay of $15.50 an hour for CNAs, and about $15 an hour for housekeepers and other workers, and hazard pay as essential workers during the pandemic.
Who can raise a family on less than $15 per hour? And we want to pay people that for dealing with people's bodily excretions? Not to mention the less than cooperative mental state sick and old people may be in due to their pain?
When you're really burned out, you don't give half a fuck about anything. It can be the choice between staying and jumping off a bridge one night, or just leaving.
I hope not many people experience that kind of stress, but if you do, just walk out. It's always an option.
Not everybody has the same job mobility people on this site do. Walking out could very well result in homelessness for many RNs.
Freedom isn't very free when your other choice is to lose the basics you need for survival.