You know, when all these Baby Boomer aged health care professionals finally retire, do you believe the next generations will be enough, to 'care' for the Baby Boomers, such a huge generation of people?
Also, do you think that the percentages of young students going into and sticking with nursing is as high as in earlier days?
There are so many other ways to make money, and with all of the cut backs and the unforgiving nature of nursing, do you forsee a big problem with getting adequate numbers of nurses to staff facilities?
Young students who go into nursing these days aren't looking to be bedside nurses or to take care of patients. Hopefully that is a trend that will change. As far as people sticking with nursing -- the generation that is just starting nursing now does not need to work in order to eat. Many of them are living with parents who provide the roof over the head, food on the table and hot and cold running wifi. I expect that people who are going to stay in nursing (or any job that they initially "hate" or even "don't like") will be those who have to pay their own bills. I suspect that there will be more of those people in the future.
"Unforgiving nature of nursing"? What's that about?
Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.
And the millennial-bashing begins.
Sigh.......nope. I see no bashing here. You are being thin-skinned. It's true; the younger/newer nurses are more likely to spend less time at the bedside than in previous times. Just look at the posts here on allnurses.com. An ever-increasing number of incoming nurses (many of whom are NOT millennial-aged, by the way) are direct-entry MSN/BSNs who want to be NPs or are new prior-degree BSNs who intend to go into advanced practice and are asking how it's done in the most expedient way, in order to avoid having to do direct patient care to be in advanced practice nursing. Or there are others who are asking how to get away from bedside care ASAP with less than a year of experience, if possible, to move on to bigger and better things. We've all seen these posts here of late; you have to admit that.
It's not "bashing" to state the truth/the obvious.
You are seeing something that is simply not there and being over-sensitive.
I call it like I see it. These threads tend to degenerate into "Every nurse younger and/or less experienced than me is an incompetent entitled snowflake."
When large numbers of nurses refuse to work at the bedside, or want to get away from it as soon as possible, the problem is the bedside, not the nurses. Improve the working environment and nurses will want to stay.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
I call it like I see it. These threads tend to degenerate into "Every nurse younger and/or less experienced than me is an incompetent entitled snowflake."
When large numbers of nurses refuse to work at the bedside, or want to get away from it as soon as possible, the problem is the bedside, not the nurses. Improve the working environment and nurses will want to stay.
You can call it Millenial Bashing if you wish -- I didn't intend it that way, but for a thread that started out Boomer Bashing, I can see where you would get the idea.
When large numbers of new nurses refuse to work at the bedside or want to get away from it as soon as possible, the problem is the nursing schools, not the bedside and not the nurses who are already at the bedside. The schools are promoting advanced degrees because more students in graduate school makes money for the schools. Their bottom line is further enhanced by the fact that many schools no longer teach actual nursing -- clinicals seem to consist of cohorts of students turned loose on the unit with the bedside nurse to supervise them without compensation. New grads are woefully ill-prepared to be actual nurses. A new nurse who refuses to work at the bedside has no real idea what working at the bedside entails -- she just doesn't want to go there because it's her "dream" to be an NP or a CRNA and she wants to achieve advanced practice without ever having learned basic practice.
Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.
And all this rapid and easy advancement to the "Dream job" of her choice of advance practice without all that nasty time spent doing "grunt work" at the bedside is achieved on the back of the boomer or gen-x nurse who HAS put in that time and honed her skills---- and IS taking making the effort to show her the ropes. And yet the "poor maligned" millennial is being somehow put-upon yet again by the evil "old hag". Humph. Okay.
Can we just agree stereotypes are wrong on all sides?
I am definitely a millennial and I didn't find the part about the people like me leaving to be offensive (after all, I'm planning on getting the heck out of nursing myself)... but I did get my feathers slightly twisted about how many of us are supposedly freeloading off of our parents, which is a total load of BS. I actually don't know any nurses who do that.
Many of my millennial coworkers own their own homes. I certainly do. I bought my house after being a nurse for a year and a half. It's easy to save up the money for a down payment on a nursing salary here. It's actually way cheaper to own than to pay rent. Some of my millennial coworkers even own multiple properties. One under 25 has his own house as well as three rentals. Several have beach or mountain vacation properties as well as primary residences that they own, as millennials, with no one else helping them.
It's the people with a bachelor's in liberal arts working at a grocery store for $7.25/hr who are living at home with their parents - not nurses.
Specializes in M/S, LTC, Corrections, PDN & drug rehab.
Want I haven't been in nursing for that long but from what I have seen in person & on here I don't think the future of nursing is in good hands.
Between all the special snowflakes crying NETY, no one wanting to stay at the bedside & the people retaking the NCLEX 5, 6, 7 or even 14 times, it makes me scared for the future or nursing & the care everyone will receive.
No unless the Baby Boomers lay off the Millennials....can you imagine the first special snowflake comment a Boomer makes to a Millennial nurse? Bwahahaha.
In all seriousness, I think that the Boomers will get healthcare, even decent healthcare. I think it will not be what they are expecting or what they imagine(d) it to be though. Medicine, at least from my limited experience of it, is becoming such a business and customer service oriented field that it is more about "how can we please you?" so that profits can be made, than "how can we heal you?"
I also think that the few truly invested healthcare workers coming up (cough cough millennials) really do have a different approach to doing things and I don't know that the generations before them understand that. It seems to be a bit....friction-y.
So we shall see. This opinion is coming from a current EMT-B and hopeful nurse to be (applied for my local nursing program this week) so like I said my experience and viewpoint is biased/limited.
In the Facility where I work Nurses are being replaced with Medical Assistants and allowed to work under a doctor's license to perform what used to be a Nursing Procedure. And the only Nurses being hired are BSN Nurses who do not stay very long due to losing a lot of Nursing skills. It will be interesting to see what happens in a few years. I think there will be a huge Nursing shortage.
We have a mixed marriage-- I'm a boomer, he's 15 years older. The recent pneumonia outbreak around here killed 3 of his classmates, damn near killed one of my colleagues (50s), one of my cousins is still in ICU (52), and did quite a number on both of us, neither with any particular health problems otherwise. His classmates are also falling to dementia and other chronic indignities. So end of life care is something we talk about often.
We have really good LTC insurance which we can use for ANYTHING-- home care, regular medical care, hospice supplemental care, equipment, moving expenses, a new car, or a trip to Paris. This is in marked contrast to my mother's, purchased 25 years ago and very restricted, so now when she needs it she cant get much out of it. We both agree that odds are that he will predecease me, and he wants very, very much not to "end up like Harry (dementia) or Bob's wife (Lewy body dementia) or Joe (brain tumor)."
He's pretty healthy now but when he becomes less so, he wants basically no treatment that would make for prolonged misery-- not just chemo/rads, say, but also any big thing, e.g., bowel resection, dialysis, home oxygen, or major trauma repair. He wants to stay at home and die in the house we have loved together for so long. So that's our plan for him.
For me, I do expect to have to sell and leave our home for someplace smaller and less maintenance-intensive. I can live with that. I told my kids if any smart-butt case manager tells them I'm an unsafe discharge to home to call the home care folks and get me out in a day. I'd rather trip over one of the cats and fall down y stairs and break my neck and die in my own front hall than spend three years, or three months, in a SNF. And if they don't let me out, I'll haunt them.
With ALL of the cutbacks & nurses in the system accepting this as the new normal, why would anyone go into nursing.
Here they are moving nurses around like pieces on a checkerboard. There is little acknowledgement of the need for maintaining experienced nurses with highly specialized training & expertise.
When a nurse steps forward to document these facts, she risks being morally shot down by management or a colleague who can't or won't resist the existing trends.
The nurse perceives it as a personal attack rather than an attack on the system which is already creating problems in the delivery of patient care. Depressing.
Not_A_Hat_Person, RN
2,900 Posts
And the millennial-bashing begins.