Can nurses unionize? It seems like they need it very badly. They get the short end of the stick with everything in medicine.
The real problem is there are not enough nurses, and a big reason for that is there are not enough nursing schools or slots in the existing nursing schools and it is extremely competitive to get into these schools - even with outstanding grades.
Just checked, the biggest hospital near me (in a medium-ish sized city) currently has 350+/- open nursing positions they are trying to hire for.
I'm aware I'm not an expert here, and I'd love to understand what the actual barrier to training more nurses is.
I have family looking to become a doctor in Canada, a country desperate for doctors.
There is so much demand to get into the limited slots you can have a near-perfect score and still not get admitted.
Canada's solution to this problem? Introduce a new test (CASPER) to further limit those who can apply.
One of my daughters friends scored very well on the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) but failed CASPER (????).
These systems seemed "rigged" to artificially limit supply and drive up wages.
She's now looking to the US so in the end, does Canada win by sending its medical professionals elsewhere?
The unions are great, and had a place but now they work against the public's best interest by limiting supply to drive up wages. Cant be a nurse in Canada without joining the union.
Everyone knows Salary is driven by salary/demand. Limit the supply what happens the price?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/dr-paul...
An American doctor volunteers three months of FREE service and is denied a license?
Normally they would use "lacks Canadian experience" but in this case he was Canadian trained.
Not to worry, the licensing group found an excuse to deny his license.
Because of COVID he was seeing patients virtually or over the phone. They managed to dig up some obscure ruling that doctors need to see patients in person, so license denied.
And the general public, could they not have benefitted from 3 months of free service? This area is absolutely DESPERATE for a doctor, but the barriers to entry must be protected at all costs.
Some nurses do go to work for payers, mainly doing case reviews and utilization management. This is absolutely necessary to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. Even in socialized medical systems they have people doing similar oversight work.
The "oversight" function provided by "insurance" companies is terrible and hostile. It does nothing to stop every day waste, like rushed appointments, doctors telling you to come back in a few weeks for another billable event, repeated tests, etc. Meanwhile it creates administrative hoops based around rejustifying treatments that have already been justified by the front line doctors, to the point that many providers employ "nurse navigators" to wade through the hassle - care-providing potential is wasted on both sides of this pointless adversarial setup.
This will, indeed, lead to having open nursing positions, but may not be as indicative of a lack of nurses as you think. It's entirely likely that those 350 open positions are currently filled by "travel nurses", making 3-5x the base salary, in which case it's more a case of those 350 positions being for people looking to take drastic pay cuts.
It's a situation the healthcare industry has fostered and it's coming home to roost, meanwhile politicians are getting involved to try to cap the nurses salaries.
And I'd put a tenner on much of the problems being rooted in the undervaluing of women's work.
From the The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) website:
>>>According to AACN’s report on 2021-2022 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing, U.S. nursing schools turned away 91,938 qualified applications (not applicants) from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2021 due to insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, and clinical preceptors, as well as budget constraints. <<<
Thats almost 100K potential nurses that were qualified to enroll, but there we no slots available for them.
Sounds more like being part of the solution. More traveling nurses equal more pay.
Eventually things will reach an equilibrium where base pay will rise enough to either attract more nurses back to the profession and/or make it profitable to train more nurses.
I don't think you are understanding that I'm saying that health care administration tends to staff at a level that overworks and undersupports nurses. Which causes many qualified nurses to leave the front-lines for nursing adjacent (one nurse friend is doing CPAP equipment rental) or leaving nursing entirely (my wife).
Nursing is a really tough career.
If you are going to be miserable at work, at least be miserable and well paid.
Why is there a need to relocate or commute as a traveling nurse?
If there is a national nurse shortage, why cannot you be a traveling nurse locally?
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.
It is not for everyone.