“Shortage of nurses”
There is no such thing as a shortage of labor. There are only shortages of wages. They should have paid more.
There is no such thing as a shortage of labor. There are only shortages of wages. They should have paid more.
-> Nurses don't get paid enough, and should be paid like tech workers for the work they do
-> Demographics changes means there simply aren't enough bodies to become nurses. This is especially true in the west now. Ontario in Canada is facing the same problem[1].
[1] https://www.ona.org/news-posts/20221117-nurse-staffing-repor...
True. This is a direct consequence of people refusing to have kids. What may be a sensible decision at an individual level is going to have disastrous consequences for societies; particularly the advanced homogeneous ones who have the unique combination of falling birthrates, generous welfare programs which need taxpayers and who are averse to immigrants from a very different culture.
Countries like USA should fare relatively better since it is easy to assimilate young people from any other country. My prediction is that small nation states in Western/Northern Europe will be the first ones to break.
You may import cheap labor at the expense of local nurses. Or you may import expensive labor at the expense of the foreign patients and local taxpayers. Or you may do nothing at the expense of local patients.
The harsh reality is that there's not enough people being allowed to fill the jobs, and you can't create them without changing something - your policies or your standards.
After all, why grow your own capacity to train and retain health care practitioners, when you can just take the non-Western world's instead?
Just say every productive young person. West has decided to not have babies of its own and instead just import them from poorer parts of the world. As an immigrant myself, I'd say it is a good deal for the West and those immigrants, but will need homogeneous cultures to be open to cultural changes.
There just a massive issue with our immigration service running out of capacity to handle applications in a timely manner and some stupid laws that need changing/updates.
Basically applications for a work permit can take somewhere between 3 to 9 months currently. A lot of people can't live that long in the country without a job so they will just go to some other EU/EEA country. Norway is a very popular option for example and will give you a yes or no decision in a week or two instead of half a year.
Tough choice if you're an oligarch.
The article, however, is very clear that this is a supply issue, and not a "demand surge."
In either case, it seems that equilibrium would set wages higher.
I completely agree that "healthcare" is not a very free market. But we are not talking about buying medicine or medical procedures, are we?
Nurses and young doctors are paid like shit so they're obviously all quitting and those that remain get so much more workload they they eventually also quit.
And then the ministers/politicians complain that "the doctors and nurses have no right to protest again" lol.
For governments ro invest more in nurse/doctor wage with a decreasing population they would need to collect more taxis (or implement copay), none are popular among the voting people.
Another reasons is that healthcare is run by policians and mostly don't know how to run things without it being at a loss.
(1) Governments don't need unlimited money, just to allocate what they have better
(2) For-profit hospitals don't pay better wages because they are for-profit. They exist for the owners/stock-holders, not the employees, who are viewed as 'human capital', not partners. There is no reason a for-profit hospital would pay its workers any more than any other, and many reasons why it would pay less
(3) People who want to 'make bank' are not nurses -- they just want to be paid fairly for the work they do, and to be able to have decent work conditions. The ones who are in it for the money are not going to be in the intake at the emergency department no matter what country or profit/social system is in effect
(4) Why would they need more taxes to pay more wages? They could take taxes they already spend on something and move it to wages, or they could borrow money, or remove inefficiencies, or print more money, or invest in the economy which will bring in more taxes -- it is not a binary decision
(5) And you think that running healthcare with CEOs and stockholders in charge who require profit growth every quarter and are used to working their staff to the point where it is just barely enough to not have everything break because that is the most profitable way to run a business -- is better?
With population decline and a shrinking workforce, the labor market takes time to readjust to the new norm of lower wealth (because lack of labor in one area means less output of services/goods).
For wages to increase taxes have to increase which also reduces viability of certain low margin businesses and further decreases societal wealth in that area of the economy. It’s all a trade off under the new reality.
You don't need to increase taxes to increase wages - you could actually collect the taxes that are due but being funnelled off into offshore accounts, you could limit the bonuses being paid to CEOs while workers struggle to heat their homes, you could cut military spending, you could not give £35B of public money to a few mates in exchange for them pretending to supply PPE. The list goes on.
In Finland, they'll expect an average of 13% raise in wages from 2022-2025 - https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2... . There's no reason to believe that shortages are solely owing to insufficient pay.
There's no such thing as a housing shortage. There are only shortages of money. You should have paid more for homes.
The supply of nurses can grow and shrink arbitrarily in response to demand.
Free markets don’t instantly respond to changes in demand, but they do respond to price signaling. The fact that the number of nurses isn’t increasing dramatically suggests the market is reasonably happy with their numbers.
What’s illustrate is the supply of new nurses isn’t dramatically increasing suggesting the market is roughly happy with their current numbers.
Here I think it's a little different. First, you can't just mint new nurses. That takes time. Second, a lot of nurses have left the profession (or at least specialties like ER and ICU) because of years of stress dealing with the fallout of the pandemic.
Nurses were at one point and in some locations quite literally choosing who gets to live and die. If you don't think that puts stress on someone, combined with being overworked, I'm not sure what to tell you. So it's not just an issue of money to lure them back, particularly when (later on) so much of this death was entirely self-inflicted (ie people choosing not to be unvaccinated).
This is starting to happen all over the world as the global baby boomer generation is aging into retirement. It's started to happen in most of western Europe, China, Japan, Russia, even the US. It's absolutely not a wage issue, it's a demographic issue.
It's possible to claim they should have paid more in the past, and that's part of the problem, but unless you're going to help immigrate already-qualified nurses from another country you can't simply increase wages and solve the problem you're having today.
Sure, now you might have enough ER nurses, but maybe now you've got a lack of primary care nurses. Or nurses at nursing facilities. Or maybe instead of just drawing from the pool of nurses you've now got fewer doctors or PA's, since you've now incentivized nursing over being an MD.
Labor shortages aren’t just money. Nauru has tech labor shortages. Singapore has notable farmer shortages. There are teacher shortages in the US even where wages pay well because teachers are sick of regulations or students. Korea has such an inverted population pyramid that its only possible future is half the country devoting their lives to caring for old people at the expense of either industries having no workers, and immigration isn’t a solution because other countries will be hitting similar problems at the same time.