The problem, health leaders say, is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week.
Mmm, demoralized and...greedy!
Quote
It's gotten to the point where doctors are saying, "Maybe I should quit being a doctor and go be a nurse," said Dr. Phillip Coule, chief medical officer at Georgia's Augusta University Medical Center
My eyeballs actually don't roll back far enough for this ^ one. ?
Quote
"I think clearly people are taking advantage of the demand that is out there," Shields said. "I hate to use `gouged' as a description, but we are clearly paying a premium and allowing people to have fairly high profit margins."
Or this ^ one.
Quote
"The nurses say, 'Hey, if I am not going to be treated with respect, I might as well go be a travel nurse,'" she said. "'That way I can go work in a hellhole for 13 weeks, but then I can take off a couple months or three months and go do whatever.'"
??
No doubt the situation is bad, but it's beyond disingenuous to pretend that all of this is primarily about Covid. As far as insinuating greedy motivations, I can't sum it up very well in a way that wouldn't get censored. One of the nurses mentioned in the article used travel money to pay off $50K in student loans. I suppose all is right with the world as long as it's just millions of individual citizens suffering and not businesses. The whole thing is somewhat sick.
In the 5+ years leading up to Covid, hospital admins have been downright gleeful over their own smug plans to profit all the more off of others' hard work and goodwill. Perhaps the number of times they can look people straight in the eye and make impossible demands and then treat them like trash when they can't do the impossible is coming to an end, or at least a hiatus. This kind of hatefulness did not used to be part of hospitals' dealings with nurses. They have been busy sending powerful messages from the top down that they could not care less if any given nurse works for them or not and have comported themselves as if mere mortals should grovel to be in their presence. They have been dismissive, disparaging and abusive. They appear to despise nurses and maybe patients, too.
And now, after spending years with mergers and takeovers and screwing communities across the country....they are actually going to cry in their beer about their problems.
I care about a lot of things, but I have zero sympathy for the concerns of hospital corporations. Zero. The rest of what I think while reading this article I can't print.
