Go While You Can...Raise the Pay!!

I would respectfully disagree that the only way to get what you want in nursing is to go into traveling for the wages.

I have been a nurse for nine years and I strive to not only provide the best of care to my patients, but I want to impact my workplace and community and make positive changes where I can. I was a member of our hospital's shared governance team and tried to help implement changes that will help the nurses and patients now and in the future.

If everyone subscribes to the "every man for himself" option and focuses on the bottom line of the highest paycheck, that won't lead to environments that anyone wants to work in. I appreciate that travel nurses are using their skillset as a means to an end, and that's fine. However, a vested interest in the hospital and community where you work isn't a bad thing. Would it be great if we were paid the same as travel nurses? Sure. But I am getting by okay on what I have, and I have coworkers that know that they can rely on me and that to me is almost as important. 

...and that is exactly what we're supposed to think.  Take what the hospital/corporate entity gives us.  We'll get to be in governance (that doesn't include a paycheck).  We'll create the best work environment, but our wages don't keep up with inflation, the staffing ratios won't change, but we'll have a voice...  What I don't understand is who programmed nurses to think and say it's one or the other.  That if you have a good wage then you don't get a good work environment. Or if you want a great work environment and to be part of a winning team then you aren't going to be paid well. It's a fallacy I used to buy into, no more.  No more saying we can't have both, no more saying there is an inverse relationship between compensation, benefits and environment.  We all need to say No More!

The environment is kinda terrible when you know your workplace is happy to pay others twice (or more) what you ear, for a significantly less amount of 'responsibility'. And oddly staffing may still be terrible because your workplace would rather tell someone to go home than pay for an extra person on your unit (when well staffed), but fine with leaving people very short and no extra pay for extra work.

3 hours ago, John Salyers said:

Ladies and Gentlemen - 

I live and work in Southern TX.  I came here almost 14 years ago.  The wages haven't changed in 14 YEARS!!  At some facilities the wages are even less than they were when I first entered this market.

So I encourage any and every nurse to recognize:

1. We are the Patient's Advocate

2. We are worthy of competitive compensation

3. We need to stop accepting wages the way they are now.

Solution: Get your year or two of experience (depending on specialty) and go travel, go to a staffing agency, get the wages that they should be paying every nurse every day. Force these organizations to recognize we won't accept being disregarded. These organizations have the money, they have the capital dollars, they give those dollars to build parking garages and give bonuses to people that make two to three times the wages of the nurses who are providing the care and filling out the electronic billing systems.

    This works for some who aren’t deeply rooted in their communities or have family commitments, but is impossible for many. Realize too that without organizing or collective bargaining, hospitals in these areas of the country have little impetus to raise stagnant wages or improve working conditions (N/P ratios).

17 hours ago, John Salyers said:

Get your year or two of experience (depending on specialty) and go travel, go to a staffing agency, get the wages that they should be paying every nurse every day. Force these organizations to recognize we won't accept being disregarded. 

I give them about 6 months or less to start announcing their own staffing companies or some other scheme to eliminate their need for procuring workers through non-affiliated agencies. I also believe that in the future they will be looking for ways to decrease their (legal) need for RNs in bedside roles altogether (after all this time saying that all RNs need to have BSNs because that improves patient outcomes).

Trust me, we won't force them to recognize anything, or at least we won't force them to respond in a particular way even if they do recognize that something is true. They diverged from the spirit of caring for people quite a long time ago, when business people and supply chain management types were suddenly elevated as experts who needed to tell nurses how nursing would be done. Corporations' interactions with nurses have been nothing but deceitful. They have reasons for every single thing they do, and their reasons are not our reasons. They expend great energy on the façade dedicated to making us believe that we have shared values.

16 hours ago, JBMmom said:

I have been a nurse for nine years and I strive to not only provide the best of care to my patients, but I want to impact my workplace and community and make positive changes where I can. I was a member of our hospital's shared governance team and tried to help implement changes that will help the nurses and patients now and in the future.

I can't imagine how many of us have (or had) similar idyllic hopes and who have tried to serve our communities in the way you describe. But there's a difference between our intentions and what is actually allowed to be accomplished. This idea of the opportunity to make positive changes allows nurses to feel part of something and feel like they have a forum, and to be able to say they served, they tried, they made some contribution. I have yet to see shared governance be able to make any significant change at odds with whatever had already been decided. Well that's not shared governance; it's more like letting your 2-year-old decide if they will sit on this chair or sit on that chair.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to simply impacting the community by providing excellent nursing care when people are acutely ill? That takes resource commitments that big business won't make. So what's left for us is to provide crappy, subpar bedside care and also serve on councils where we get to have an impact on some small part of how we are going to accomplish the corporation's numerous agendas.

16 hours ago, JBMmom said:

If everyone subscribes to the "every man for himself" option and focuses on the bottom line of the highest paycheck, that won't lead to environments that anyone wants to work in.

I agree and know this is true. Sincerely. The problem is that where we are right now is also not an environment in which people want to work; nor can they tolerate it for the long haul.

I don't think reliance on travelers is the best thing for patients. But neither is the (now baseline) paucity of honed experience on nursing floors/units. Neither is short-staffing. Neither is widget-style nursing. And on and on. This isn't happening because one CEO somewhere made "a" bad decision and ticked off 100 nurses, but because of wide-spread business efforts that are rarely aligned with core values important to nursing and patient care. We might just be in a time in history where things are indeed going to be rough and unpleasant because for years businesses have refused to make the commitments that would have taken things in a different direction. I don't think it's good to be reactionary but at the same time I also believe that if one entity has the power and the opportunity to make a choice and they freely make a choice that hurts others, then there is very little room to complain about how people respond to that.

It's very complicated and from my perspective there are the ideals and then there is reality. In my ideal world we would have been heard sometime during the whole period where the mediocre among us were gleefully reading their leadership manuals, championing Lean, earning Six Sigma belts and instituting innumerable "improvement" projects and basically changing nursing into an assembly line job. But they didn't listen. They mocked, they became angry, they disparaged those of us who enjoy nursing, for wanting to practice nursing.

While unionization won't solve everything it would be a good start in many areas. Unfortunately the propaganda machine is strong against organizing and many still have the misguided opinion that their company will watch out for them.

Until we accept that we are not these saintly nun like angels of mercy answering to a calling to nurse but instead paid professionals there will never be any improvement in our power or working conditions. Whenever we demand ANYTHING management clutches their pearls and say "But think of the PATIENTS!" insinuating that we are monsters for requesting to be treated as human even though they do everything they can to undermine patient care all to spin a profit. 

Our compassion has been used to manipulate, brainwash, and disempower our entire profession. Bedside nurses have the least amount of say over healthcare yet we are the soldiers in the trenches believed by many to simply be too stupid to be able to find our way out of the muck into a lofty management or paper pushing job.

Until we simply no longer show up for work nothing on a large scale will change. "But patients will die!" So? Patients are already dying due to the state of things often by inches over multiple years and millions of dollars worth of sub par care that never fixes a problem but simply creates new ones. If we are going to take on so much responsibility then give us a voice, not "nursing leaders" who haven't touch a patient in 20 years, someone who actually is at the bedside getting their butts handed to them on a daily basis.

I love taking care of people, but I don't love being everybody's literal and figurative punching bag. I don't love working 16 hour days because the sheer volume of work won't allow for a shorter work day. I don't love being so mentally and physically exhausted all the time and so drained emotionally from the toxicity of human behavior that many days I feel dead inside. That's not what nursing has done to me, it's what our healthcare system and horrors of the past year have done to me. All so a bunch of jerks could make a buck. 

4 hours ago, JKL33 said:

I give them about 6 months or less to start announcing their own staffing companies or some other scheme to eliminate their need for procuring workers through non-affiliated agencies. I also believe that in the future they will be looking for ways to decrease their (legal) need for RNs in bedside roles altogether (after all this time saying that all RNs need to have BSNs because that improves patient outcomes).

Trust me, we won't force them to recognize anything, or at least we won't force them to respond in a particular way even if they do recognize that something is true. They diverged from the spirit of caring for people quite a long time ago, when business people and supply chain management types were suddenly elevated as experts who needed to tell nurses how nursing would be done. Corporations' interactions with nurses have been nothing but deceitful. They have reasons for every single thing they do, and their reasons are not our reasons. They expend great energy on the façade dedicated to making us believe that we have shared values.

I can't imagine how many of us have (or had) similar idyllic hopes and who have tried to serve our communities in the way you describe. But there's a difference between our intentions and what is actually allowed to be accomplished. This idea of the opportunity to make positive changes allows nurses to feel part of something and feel like they have a forum, and to be able to say they served, they tried, they made some contribution. I have yet to see shared governance be able to make any significant change at odds with whatever had already been decided. Well that's not shared governance; it's more like letting your 2-year-old decide if they will sit on this chair or sit on that chair.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to simply impacting the community by providing excellent nursing care when people are acutely ill? That takes resource commitments that big business won't make. So what's left for us is to provide crappy, subpar bedside care and also serve on councils where we get to have an impact on some small part of how we are going to accomplish the corporation's numerous agendas.

I agree and know this is true. Sincerely. The problem is that where we are right now is also not an environment in which people want to work; nor can they tolerate it for the long haul.

I don't think reliance on travelers is the best thing for patients. But neither is the (now baseline) paucity of honed experience on nursing floors/units. Neither is short-staffing. Neither is widget-style nursing. And on and on. This isn't happening because one CEO somewhere made "a" bad decision and ticked off 100 nurses, but because of wide-spread business efforts that are rarely aligned with core values important to nursing and patient care. We might just be in a time in history where things are indeed going to be rough and unpleasant because for years businesses have refused to make the commitments that would have taken things in a different direction. I don't think it's good to be reactionary but at the same time I also believe that if one entity has the power and the opportunity to make a choice and they freely make a choice that hurts others, then there is very little room to complain about how people respond to that.

It's very complicated and from my perspective there are the ideals and then there is reality. In my ideal world we would have been heard sometime during the whole period where the mediocre among us were gleefully reading their leadership manuals, championing Lean, earning Six Sigma belts and instituting innumerable "improvement" projects and basically changing nursing into an assembly line job. But they didn't listen. They mocked, they became angry, they disparaged those of us who enjoy nursing, for wanting to practice nursing.

^^^Brilliant^^^  I have long maintained that while our current model of healthcare delivery may be the most profitable, it's absolutely unsustainable for the long haul.  As long as the great Ponzi scheme, AKA corporate healthcare, continues to make money hand-over-fist by keeping politicians, academicians, AMA, ANA... in their pockets, sadly, things will not change.  More profit over patients disguised as cleverly worded hospital mission statements.

5 hours ago, JKL33 said:

They mocked, they became angry, they disparaged those of us who enjoy nursing, for wanting to practice nursing.

I agree with much of what you wrote, and part of me also puts blame on nursing education itself. No one is encouraged to be the best bedside nurse they can when they graduate. Before we even had a diploma our school was telling us that we MUST want to go back and further our education to get away from the bedside. Patient care was viewed as a brief necessity in the career of all of these brand new nurses that should want something more. if the role of bedside nurse isn't even respected within it's own profession, how can we expect respect from anyone else? 

2 hours ago, JBMmom said:

I agree with much of what you wrote, and part of me also puts blame on nursing education itself. No one is encouraged to be the best bedside nurse they can when they graduate. Before we even had a diploma our school was telling us that we MUST want to go back and further our education to get away from the bedside. Patient care was viewed as a brief necessity in the career of all of these brand new nurses that should want something more. if the role of bedside nurse isn't even respected within it's own profession, how can we expect respect from anyone else? 

I graduated in 1992 and it was the same thing then.  Outside of nursing school clinicals, not one of my nursing professors had direct patient care experience for years.  

On 9/21/2021 at 1:25 PM, JBMmom said:

If everyone subscribes to the "every man for himself" option and focuses on the bottom line of the highest paycheck, that won't lead to environments that anyone wants to work in. I appreciate that travel nurses are using their skillset as a means to an end, and that's fine. However, a vested interest in the hospital and community where you work isn't a bad thing.

I agree 100% with you on being vested in a hospital, a community, your unit....  It is why I am where I am.  

But.....

Our wages are a direct result of simple market forces.  As long as hospitals can fill positions with substandard wages, they will.  Businesses do not pay more for a commodity than they need, and we are a commodity.

Managers have failed to value skill, experience, and loyalty, which has created the travel market.  The did not happen to them- it is something they did.

When the market forces favor treating staff fairly to retain them, they will adapt.  The question is how much stupid tax they pay in the process.

Think about it- even now, when it couldn't be more clear how badly this is going to go-  How many nurses here work in places that are aggressively trying to retain staff?  

11 hours ago, TheMoonisMyLantern said:

Our compassion has been used to manipulate, brainwash, and disempower our entire profession.

Our compassion for sure. I don't mean to be a broken record but there are some other features they have tapped into, specifically our self-deprecation, our tendency to take responsibility for problems that others created, our general less-than-stellar self-esteem. That's how they easily said those mean doctors should not be using a mean or frustrated tone of voice. Come sit over here at our table and we'll help you rise up. HA. HA.  Way too many of us fell for that and their angle the whole time wasn't to help us but to bring doctors down and put them in our same box. Workers. Widgets.

I know I can get dramatic when discussing this but....man, when these people's mouths are moving they are lying.

7 hours ago, morelostthanfound said:

I graduated in 1992 and it was the same thing then.  Outside of nursing school clinicals, not one of my nursing professors had direct patient care experience for years.  

'93 for me, and it was exactly the same