Umm, when did I ever say that?
It’s the entire connotation of your posts. “Oh, the doctors are going to get paid a lot and the nurses won’t.” Sorry, wrong. Nurses DO get paid a lot.
Try this for fun: Graduate with a PhD and then work about 100 hours a week. Sleep over in the lab to perform a 12h time-point once-a-week for six months. For about $25k/year. Well, that was just the first year. With more grants I made $29k! Then $30k! I thought I was rich! After a few years I was up around $40k. Man, those were the good old days.
But I never complained about my job for want of lucre, because I loved it. I only ever had a gripe when I was treated unfairly, which happens a lot in those circles, sadly. I happens a lot in medicine too.
Hopefully they weren’t refering to you, but to that complaint in general. Honestly, at times it frustrates me too. There is a HUGE range when it comes to nursing salaries depending on the amount of education and the specialty. There are nurses who make very little and nurses who make a LOT.
More often than not, when I hear nurses complain it is usually about hours and working conditions.
/end hijack
Oh… my turn!
MMMMWWAAAHHHH !!! SMACK! SMACK ! SMACK!
Holy crap! A doctors ass tastes like … well… ass!
Yes, it’s true. A year from now I will be entering Real-World medicine, and based on the offers I’ve been entertaining so far, I will most likely be getting what I consider to be a handsome salary for it.
Then again, I have friends who are going into gastroenterology, radiology, and dermatology, and once they get into their careers proper, they will be making at least twice what I’m making as a rural primary care internist.
I guess I could be pissed about that, but I’m not in the least. They were willing to get the grades and endure the longer training to do jobs that I would find incredibly boring. So more power to them (though when we get together in a few years, they will be the ones buying dinner).
If I wanted to be pissed, I’d be pissed about the paltry sum that my mother makes, which after 29 years at the same school is just a bit more than I’m making as a resident. And, yeah, I am pretty pissed about that, because it doesn’t exactly encourage the best and brightest to get jobs shaping the minds of tomorrow.
But you know what? Different people get paid different amounts to do different things. I think baseball stars and CEOs of major corporations probably ought to be paid less, and teachers, cops, and (yes) nurses ought to be paid more, but really, nobody asked me how the world should work before it got put together this way.
I have never understood WHY residents have to work all those continuous hours, except for the cupidity of TPTB. As a patient, I’d like to be reasonably sure that in the past 24 hours the doctor who holds my life and sanity in his/her hands has, in the past 24 hours, gotten at least two good meals and at least six hours of sleep. If there’s been some sort of crisis, like the World Trade towers, then I acknowledge that NOBODY in the emergency services is going to be well-rested for some time. But in the normal scheme of things, I think that doctors and all health professionals are entitled to have their basic needs met.
I also don’t understand why nurses have to regularly work more than 12 hours a day. That’s insane, a holdover from the 19th century.
Over the past few years, I’ve spent more time than I’d like in an ER and in a hospital room, and I’m amazed at the good humor of most of the medical personnel. And I don’t understand why they put up with such shitty conditions.
Dude, they didn’t have time, they were in the huge line for kissing your ass! 
I agree. There is evidence that driving while sleep deprived is just as dangerous as driving while intoxicated.(no sleep for 24 hours same as driving intoxicated) I can only imagine that trying to make life or death treatment decisions while sleep deprived are similarlly dangerous.
I sure as hell couldn’t function and do my job properly if I worked for 30 hours straight, and I’m a secretary at the moment. I never understood why people expected doctors and nurses to work these kinds of hours. It surely isn’t in the patients’ best interest to be treated by somebody who’s so tired and so hopped up on caffiene that their eyeballs are twitching…
Dr. J. I’d kiss your ass, if only you’d airlift me some Carolina Q.
The irony is that I often stay up for those kinds of hours. I work 12 shifts on the night crew in data processing. I can’t take naps, so the after the 1st day of my work week, my brain is fried. If I didn’t sleep *well * after the first day (which happens, because it’s hard to sleep during the day) I find it hard to concentrate on the 2nd day and make errors.
Because we love what we do, plain and simple. I couldn’t imagine being anything else. I’m not making nurses (or doctors) out to be some kind of saints. We do what we do, many of us for lower salaries and long nasty hours, because we are lucky enough to do what we love. We may bitch at great length about how frustrating it is, but the payoff is this wonderful feeling at the end of the day that you did something good for someone.
However; as this is the Pit; DoctorJ, please reserve a special place in the line for drug reps. I’m sure it was just an oversight, but they are demonspawn and should be destroyed.
But surely you recognize that you could do what you love much more effectively and well if you were never forced to do so when physically and mentally exhausted from being forced to work excessively long hours for no apparent reason but the scheduling and financial convenience of hospital administrations, right?
Sixteen hour nursing shifts and thirty hour shifts for residents don’t serve the needs of patients and don’t serve the nurses and residents, but because patients in hospitals can’t readily say “Are you well rested? How long have you been here? 28 hours? No, don’t touch me, I want someone else.” especially when they’re seriously ill, in pain or injured, there is no particular impetus for the situation to change.
If those of you inside of this very very broken system could tell us, the consumers, what we can do to help you to be better able to help us vis-a-vis ensuring that you’re serving us without the impediment of exhaustion, I don’t doubt that many of us will gladly do it.
Ah, pillwhores. They should burn the fiery pits of deepest hell in the closeout Ann Taylor pantsuits and company-leased Chrysler Concordes they slime-trail in.
But… free pens!
Oh, and while I’m sorry for contributing to the hijack I’d just like to point out that when I graduate from uni with my bachelors in nursing I’m going to be making less than my brother does driving a forklift in a warehouse.
Sounds like nursing salaries there are far below where they should be, or forklift drivers are well paid. Sorry to hear it.
HELL YES!! Although, in all fairness to the administration (may a special place be reserved for them in one of their own hospitals), their buggery of the system is nothing compared to what HMO’s do to it every day.
There was a time, not that long ago, when this was actually improving. Health care was a desireable career, hospitals were improving on several levels. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, and why it all started spiralling downward again, people point to several different things. Unfortunately, too much time is spent trying to lay blame and not enough trying to correct the myriad of problems.
Now, THAT is the best offer I’ve had in a long time. And while it’s obviously heartfelt, all I could think when I read it was…where to start? Nurses are bailing the hospital system in droves for the private sector for several reasons. The work load, the hours, burn out, feeling totally unappreciated, and yes, salary. Short of a total revamping of the entire system, I just don’t know what to tell you.
Salaries come directly out of payments from insurance companies and patients. As has already been stated in this thread, many people believe I make a boat load of money. Saying “It ain’t true” doesn’t change their minds. Also to be paid for is equipment, beds, bedding, supplies, damn…EVERYTHING you see in a hospital has to be paid for. Those bills patients are constantly complaining of… They get paid at about … oh, a quarter of original charges. Between a quarter and a third. The cuts have to be made somewhere, and unfortunately, if you’re going to pass a JCAHO inspection, the cuts usually come in the way of reducing staff. 
I’m not happy about it, but I understand the logic.
Bless you. Free pens and stress balls just don’t make up for those people standing there smiling their smarmy smile at me.
To give credit where it’s due, I stole the line from former doper Satan (known as NYCNative at that other board we hang out on occasionally), who once ended an excellent new-asshole-tearing of someone with “In closing, lick my bag.”
OK, what the fuck is an RP, what the fuck is an RN, and what the fuck is a resident? Just askin’, man.