Covid just gave the realization that even if we face a global crisis where nurses are dying on the front, the rest of society is not willing to provide the bare minimum these people deserve.
the truly tragic part of all of this is that as much as we would like to imagine these nurses confidently walking away from a bad situation like some sort of power move.. a lot of them are not. A lot are finally leaving because they are broken and feel broken enough that they dont feel capable of being responsible for patients anymore.
To reiterate- many (most?) nurses that quit still want to help people, but no longer feel capable of helping. That is a level of trauma that can be passed down to the next generation. It might take effort to let the gravity of this reality sink in.
Anecdotally, my mom is a nurse and she has come home and cried due to sheer helplessness to her work problems on more than one occasion. Shes near retirement age and switched careers into this late in life to help people so this is pretty much it for her. If the system does not show mercy and continues to grind her out then she leaves the workforce feeling helpless and broken.
It goes beyond payment. better pay will go a LONG way, and is absolutely necessary.. but it is not enough. There needs to be more redundancy, because 100% utilization of that kind of resource in that kind of system is something that would get you a failing grade in system design.
Who’s going to care for all of them? Do we just make healthcare even more expensive, raise everyone’s pay, and hire a fuckload of new nurses? I’ve never heard of an RN being out of work for very long; I can’t imagine there’s a lot of well-trained RNs looking to be hired. Seems like we’ve backed ourselves into a corner we’re about to wall off.
Does anyone know how we fix this? I’m very interested in hearing ideas.
