Oh brother. Ok–yes, hospitals can and do offer programs such as you describe. there is the so called Baylor program–you work every weekend and get paid like a FT employee. There are other such programs, sign on bonuses, stipends if you recruit a friend to work at your hospital…all manner of incentives.
Most of them don’t work all that well–because the root causes of the shortage are not being addressed. The job is effing hard–physically and emotionally demanding. Not just anybody can be a nurse–and frankly, alot of the creme de le creme have found less tasking, more prestigous jobs in law, engineering, science or business–even med school. Nursing is a conservative industry that has NOT kept pace with either the feminist movement or the pressures and changes of modern society. When I graduated, I was STILL expected to give up my seat for a doctor at the nursing station, for example. Alot of the culture surrounding nursing is archaic.
Scenario: you are an RN who has a current license. You have two kids, elementary school age. Your husband tells you, we could use some extra income, now that Jr is in school. You think about this…should you go back into hospital nursing–working weekends and holidays, maybe even off shifts, expose yourself to any number of contagions, physical injury, verbal abuse etc or should you go work oh, at the library, the local Walmart, Starbucks, a doctor’s office, telemarketer…
Bottom line: there are other, more appealing choices for women out there now. Until nursing becomes an independent contractor to hospitals (like docs are now)–and until we are no longer lumped into the HOUSEKEEPING budget at many hospitals, it’s not gonna get more appealing than other career choices.
Money is a great incentive, but it is not the only one.
My mother is a nurse in an outpatient surgery unit. She really, really loves it (small hospital, mostly supportive admin, great benefits, etc), but most of her coworkers are as you describe. Her own mental health has been a lot better since she got transfered from the shark pit that is “the floor” (general patient care) and into her unit, where she only has to work with 2 other nurses.
She says that nurses are more likely to marry abusive or otherwise unsuitable men (thinking they can “fix” them, I guess).
What is your opinion of Nurse’s Unions? My mom has a low opinion of them, mostly because one of the women that she works with is completely incompetent- has been fired from nearly every hospital up and down the Oregon Coast, and only has her current job because the admin forgot to fire her before her evaluation period expired. She does things like puts supplies and drugs away in the wrong places (in a surgery unit), ignores patients asking for help in the same room with her, screws up paperwork (including Dr’s orders) and is such an emotional wreck the half the time she can’t function even at her usual level of incompetence.
She got the local union to successfully sue the last hospital that fired her, so my mom’s hospital is afraid to try anything similar, even though her mistakes are well-documented. She is also one of those “eat your own young” type people, always gossiping to the Drs, nurses, and even the patients.
I would think that unions would be in the best position to influence the problems you described, by putting political pressure on state schools to expand nursing programs and working with administrators to change the culture within the hospitals.
To me, it would depend on the union. My hospital is fighting off a union interest–and rightly so, since nursing has little in common with the bulk of this union’s membership.
While I believe in unions for some industries, I do not believe in them(in general) for nursing. It has been my experience that unions work to further the interests of the union, not the individual members/industries. I just don’t see the benefit. The California case is somewhat different.
Og knows a hospital doesn’t have to have a union to keep incompetent people on staff. That is a worldwide problem for all industries, really.
As for getting off the floor–in a heartbeat. I crosstrained for PACU (recovery room) but then rec room didn’t need me because the docs took most of their ops to Indiana d/t the med mal crisis we had here in IL. I am in stepdown at present.
I would love to work same day surgery or similiar. I keep an eye out–I will make the move when I can.
As for the rest of the post: alot of nurses come from dsyfunctional backgrounds and they were the caregivers at very young ages. Alot of nurses marry cops–another high stress service job with its share of dysfunctionality. I hear some of the stuff that some nurses talk about at work and my mind boggles–my problems are very small beer next to theirs.
Sadly, there is the concept that helpers don’t need help–so many nurses do not seek out counselling or support.
There is not a free market in healthcare in the US. Supply and demand always applies. It is like gravity. Even command and control economies can’t get away from it. What happens though is that they pervert the signals generated by the economy in such a way that all kinds of really strange things happen.
For instance, you would think that the wages for nurses would rise until there was no longer a shortage of nurses. The high wages are the economy’s way of signalling that we need more nurses. Now if you have the government limiting what can be paid for services on the other end of the equation then you can’t really come up with the money to attract more nurses. You also increase the demand for healthcare (Hey guys look! It’s FREE!!!) Then you throw in the fact that the supply of nurses and doctors is artificially limited and you end up with a mess where there are all kinds of demands and no way to fill them so you end up with shortages. It is a completely predictable outcome.
Growing up, I’d always thought that nurses were highly paid. I don’t know when that general societal impression changed, but for me it changed one “career day” at school when the parent/nurse said that the high-paid impression was false! Ever since that time, I’ve been led to believe that they’re low paid.
Here’s a page of average salaries.. For everything that they do and their hours and their treatment, this ain’t a heck of a lot of money. Okay, maybe some get high salaries right out of school in certain areas, but that doesn’t seem to be typical. So considering what they do it doesn’t seem like a good salary. Standing on its own, though, it’s not a bad salary, but it’s not the best. It beats McDonald’s.
Okay, given the above, it’s probably likely that I’m way out of touch since everyone I work with and know (my peers) make within an order of magnitude of what I do . Maybe we should compare nursing salaries with other national salaries. The problem is, everything about average salaries includes minimum wage and part time work which, while arguably important, falls outside our peer group and should be discounted in all such averages. Yeah, I’m being a bastard for brushing the poor under the carpet, but we’re interested now in comparing salaries among potential peers, and the very,very poor aren’t peers. So can anyone point to some averages and medians that discount the working poor? Then we’ll have an effective gauge on whether current nurse salaries make any sense.
I have 20+ years of experience, in ICU, stepdown, home health and med/surg (and recovery room, a bit). I am ACLS and BCLS certified. I am a former CCRN (critical care RN certification–prestigious and hard as hell to pass).
I make approx $2/hr more THAN A NEW GRAD. I may be overestimating that–it could be as low as $1.hr.
Show me an industry (white collar) where someone with 20+ yrs experience plus accreditations/committee work/mentoring etc makes that.
There is very sluggish to no salary growth in this industry. It almost pushes people out after a certain number of years. Alot of hospitals WANT new grads–so that they can pay less, but also younger nurses seem to vote with their feet, not worry about pensions and job hop to some extent. That works in the hospital’s favor.
You’re wrong about that. There is practically zero routine advertising for direct recruitment in the US, UK and Canada for professions other than nursing.
And yes, as I’ve been reading before I posted, there are obviously other factors. Ignorance fought.