‘At a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts.
And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay. That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.’
(Bolding mine)
With Universal Health Care, people’s health comes first.
Apparently with the US system, it’s just about the money. :smack:
You’re missing most of the story. 1) Non-necessary medical treatments are being postponed by order of the governments. and 2) Many people, even if they have some sort of medical necessity, are not going to hospitals out of fear of catching COVID-19 there. So there’s not enough work for nursing staff. Just like restaurant employees have been terminated, unneeded nursing staff are being terminated.
It’s not about people’s health coming first or not. There’s just not enough demand for the services these nurses perform.
Hospitals in the US are heavily supported by elective surgery. So yes, it is all about that money.
With less elective surgery, a lot of nurses have little to no work. (on preview, see above)
It might take decades to achieve real UHC in the USA. We have a sizable population against it and many embedded interests, especially our giant insurance industry with legions of lobbyist with loads of money to spread around.
My sister is caught in a horrible gray area, she’s averaged 2 days a week work so losing 3/5th of her pay but isn’t eligible for unemployment. She’s an Endo Nurse.
Some hospitals have cancelled or postponed elective surgeries and procedures, so the only inpatients are ones with COVID-19 or those whose surgeries or procedures could not be cancelled. As a result, these hospitals are emptier than they would be in normal times. So some staff, like the surgical scrub nurses, surgeons, physical therapists, radiology technicians, etc have been sent home.
The U.S healthcare system is terrible for many reasons, but I’m not really sure of the relevance of what you’re citing to UHC vs the US system.
Right now for obvious reasons nobody wants to go near a hospital unless they are dying. So in places that don’t have many cases of the virus to deal with, hospitals and medical staff have nothing to do, just as many people have nothing to do with the lockdown and social distancing. This has nothing to do with it being “just about the money” or denying people medical care. Nobody wants medical care right now unless they absolutely need it.
There are questions about whether furloughed staff should still be paid by large corporations who can afford it, but that applies to all large corporations, not just those in healthcare.
I agree with Riemann; much of this is not unique to America’s admittedly fucked up healthcare system. I assume other countries have cancelled or postponed elective procedures, so that their scrub nurses and such were sent home. (In theory, you can retrain scrub nurses as floor nurses, but that would take a while.)
Never actually worked in a hospital setting, but isn’t floor nurse closer to an entry-level position than scrub nurse? Or are they both entry level (or higher-than-entry-level tier, but on different tracks)?
I’m not qualified to answer that but I’m sure others here are. My sense is that they are different specialties within nursing, not necessarily that one is a higher-level position.
I suppose that’s possible, but don’t nursing school graduates complete roughly the same curriculum, and have their specialized training after they get placed?
So what do you think is happening in UHC countries? Here in the Netherlands the insurance companies are paying the hospitals in advance for elective surgery that will now happen later in the year… this is the whole point of UHC systems, they are based on cooperation rather than competition (both between care provider and insurance company and insurance company and client.
I’ve not heard about any hospital personel being fired. There are issues with some health care providers (dentists, physios) having liquidity issues, but they get government support.
So wouldn’t the hospitals in the Netherlands have the same problem? The money they are getting now for surgeries later could be used to pay salaries today to the scrub nurses and others associated with the surgical departments even though the surgeries aren’t happening. But then later in the year, when the surgeries do happen, the hospital won’t be getting any money because they were already paid. So there’s still a gap.
My BFF’s sister is in the same situation. They’ve cancelled non-emergency scopes, so they’ve gone from averaging 30 procedures daily to maybe 5 or 6, so she has volunteered to work in the nearby hospital if needed. Fortunately for them, their kids are grown and her husband makes adequate money to support them, but it’s just a big unexpected shock that nobody had planned for.
Why are elective surgeries being cancelled when there are available resources?
Is it simply to keep patients out of facilities that have COVID patients? Can they not just make sure these procedures are done in separate facilities?
Or do elective surgeries share some scarce resource with ICU patients?
Or is there some risk management that says for every X number of elective surgeries, there must be Y spare capacity of ICU in case it goes wrong?
My brother is a visiting nurse. A lot of his cases are providing follow-up care changing dressings for people who have gone home after surgery. He says he has many fewer cases because a lot of surgeries have been postponed. I’m not sure how that affects his income.
Ironically, he was supposed to have a hip replacement in June that he thinks will be postponed.
There’s lots of reasons, any of which are going to apply to different hospitals to different degrees:
stay at home orders are real, and the hospitals shouldn’t be the ones breaking them
if you’re bringing in patients for elective surgeries, then you’ve got waiting rooms full of people, staff to check them in, staff for the surgeries, etc - any of these people could be asymptomatic carriers spreading disease to any/all of the others
your own staff are both the ones at highest risk (contact with the most patients) and the ones who present the highest risk to the public if they are carriers. As a medical professional, you definitely don’t want to be the cause of the next hotspot
you’re diverting PPE, sedatives, surgical supplies, etc from where they are most urgently needed
yes, you want to keep medical pros in reserve as spare capacity, because you don’t know when the next wave will hit or a bunch of hospital staff will get exposed and need to self-quarantine. You definitely don’t want all of the elective surgery staff in self quarantine because some idiot who wanted a mole removed didn’t mention that he was coughing and running a fever.
even well-managed elective surgery has a complication rate, and so you need to do follow-up and sometimes admit patients. You can’t just stop treatment because the ER suddenly got slammed, and you don’t want to be admitting your basically healthy patients with minor complications into a contagion zone.
your patient population is probably also wary of coming in to a hospital. There’s lots and lots of cases of people coming for childbirth, for headaches, for whatever, who turned out several days later to also be COVID positive. There isn’t really a “safe” side of the hospital, and even if you’re in the supposedly safe area, you need to park in the same parking lots, touch the same door handles, and ride the same elevators as the people who have a contagious disease.
I’m one of the people impatiently awaiting an “elective” procedure - one which is technically optional but badly needed for long term health and quality of life. I’m 100% willing to wait until the risks involved in going into surgery are lower than the risks involved in waiting.