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[ChairmanPoo]

BTW: that article lacks context. I researched the matter and the hospital losing staff sued the other hospital for unfair competition NOT it's soon to be former employees. In fact the court didnt forbid the employees from leaving, and the way it is set, unless both hospitals come to an agreement, they will not be working in either.   No idea on how it helps anyone tbh but that's where they stand.

my take is that most healthcare employers are crappy, and  you see all sort of underhanded tactics. I'm struggling to think of a workplace in which I was not deceived and TBH all I can think of is in which I was deceived the least. Hospitals poaching each other employees and then slugging it out is not so frequent in Europe because public healthcare is common and one way or the other departments are hesitant about worker poaching. With the current shortages they are becoming less hesitant, though so tbh I'm not surprised that in a free at-will employment setting they're ducking it out with all they have.


TLDR: probably both hospital management teams are cunt. My best wishes to the healthcare personnel involved and I hope that in one place or the other they can find better working conditions. Which is hard to do in the current climate.

[wierd]

I agree that the AMA is a massive part of the problem with US health care.  Increasing the supply of medical professionals is the only way to bring down costs, which is of course why that organization doesn't want to increase the supply.

Regarding Wisconsin - well if I were those 7 people, I'd just quit anyway, and possibly go work for some other third party for those 90 days.  My reading is the injunction just prevents them from working for the new organization - I don't think it forces them to keep working.  I would totally be behind a campaign to donate enough to those 7 employees so they can go without working for those 90 days.

If the original organization did try to test the waters to force people to work - hah well either we really have lost the country, or that organization will be SOL.

Sure, they can spend a fraction of those three months working some credential-less job instead of helping people.  And since it's only seven people and is a big story, random donators can support them.

But this establishes a despicable precedent.  It's not just about seven people.

I'm looking forward to talking to my mother about this.  She's a former nurse, and a few weeks ago she was unloading with me about how awful travel-nursing is.  She disliked the travel-nurses for taking more money and providing worse service, in her expert opinion.  I think she was right about the service being worse.  All I added was: if hospitals are willing and able to pay travel-nurses these excessive salaries, why can't they retain their local, more-effective employees by offering competitive wages?

We left it at that, but I think she considered it a good point and politely raised.  (More so than most of the leftist chatter I casually share with her).

That would make total sense, if you did not approach it from a "risk based pricing" approach.

Instead, consider how a staff nurse is a recurring cost center, and a travel-nurse is a short-term term of engagement, intended to fill an immediate, operation ending hole, to prevent catastrophic shutdown.

The staff nurse should get paid the barest minimum required to retain thier services, to keep that recurring cost center low.

The travel nurse, on the other hand, needs to be highly paid to offset the "interest" costs incurred by travel expenses, competition for the travelling nurse's time from rival hospitals (during a labor shortage), and be balanced against the financial risks of failure to meet mandatory staffing, and having to shut down and not see/lose patients.

[Rolan7]

In conclusion:  Travel-nursing is bad, and is a feature (not even a consequence) of Capitalism.

My mother thinks in terms of helping people.  Our state does not.

[ChairmanPoo]

I assume a travel nurse is kind of like the agency locums in ireland and the uk?

[LordBaal]

Wow that is stupid. Why on  earth, beyond idiocy one would any country desire to have less doctors.

[hector13]

PrOfIt MaRgInS

[Lord Shonus]

Wow that is stupid. Why i  earth, beyond idiocy one would any country desire to have less doctors.

The goal of the AMA (which is a professional association, not a government agency) tries to prevent a glut of medical professionals is to keep medical wages high. Their stated concern is that they're trying to prevent the "wow, this lucrative profession is short-staffed! I (and 30,000 shiny new college students just like me) should major in that to take advantage" followed by "You can't get a job in this profession because there's a hundred applicants to every position, and it pays like crap because everybody's easy to replace" cycle you see in other jobs. In practice, the AMA is made up of wealthy doctors who have a vested interest in keeping doctor pay high and are stable enough to avoid the downsides.

[wierd]

I assume a travel nurse is kind of like the agency locums in ireland and the uk?

Dont have experience to confirm;

A travelling nurse, is a nurse that specializes in meeting short term staffing crunches, or in rotation queues with essential but remote areas of operation where attracting skilled full time staff is not possible, but where staff is vitally necessary.

Consider a rural hospital, out on some pacific island, that is a part of the public healthcare system. That hospital is the only hospital on the island, and services that island, and likely any surrounding islands. Patients would die in transport if ghey were attempted to be taken anywhere else, so the hospital *must* function. The island lacks the educational infrastructure needed to produce local staff nurses.

Where do the nurses needed to run the hospital come from?

Travel nurses!

(This happens in some remote parts of the country, like Alaska, where the hospitals are private, but owned by a large hospital network, and sustaining the hospital is a legal requirement for some other cherry arrangement in a more profitable locality, and thus similarly, *must function*, despite availability of local staffing.

Travel nurses also fill emergency staffing needs, such as "major earthquake destroys half of los angeles!" Or "hurricane levels entire state of georgia!", where a logistically unfeasible number of workers is needed, needed right now, and no, it cant wait.

Sadly, they are also often used as "instant scabs" during hospital pay/treatment disputes with local staff.

[ChairmanPoo]

Yeah. Like agency locums.

In Ireland as a consultant you can make 110€ an hour doing that

[ChairmanPoo]

Wow that is stupid. Why i  earth, beyond idiocy one would any country desire to have less doctors.

The goal of the AMA (which is a professional association, not a government agency) tries to prevent a glut of medical professionals is to keep medical wages high. Their stated concern is that they're trying to prevent the "wow, this lucrative profession is short-staffed! I (and 30,000 shiny new college students just like me) should major in that to take advantage" followed by "You can't get a job in this profession because there's a hundred applicants to every position, and it pays like crap because everybody's easy to replace" cycle you see in other jobs. In practice, the AMA is made up of wealthy doctors who have a vested interest in keeping doctor pay high and are stable enough to avoid the downsides.

Like I said, its not *just* that. There are other factors at play, like ensuring training standards are being met. I'm not naive enough to think keeping control of the job market isnt a factor, but its not the only factor.

 I've seen a variety of training models. Restricting training posts is *not* the only bad outcome you can see. The UK and Ireland keep huge numbers of junior doctors (usually foreign) running around, but choke access to training schemes to attending//consultant positions (true in both but particularily bad in Ireland). This generates a lot of cheap labor, but  eventually trainees leave to places where they do have a future. This in turn leaves you in a situation where the only ones staying are either unable to leave for whatever reason (ie family), so terrible that noone else will take them, or draconian in dictating their working terms (you thought travelling nurses were bad, how about the same but with junior docs?)

Spain took the reverse approach for decades to try to produce an excess of attendings to keep labor cheap, the current outcome is that HCW beat it en masse because literally any country in Europe can offer better working conditions.  The solutions being floated are not great either... rather than improving working conditions the knee-jerk reaction has been to try to bully hcw further, and loosen the vetting process to verify that foreign trainees have actually undergone equivalent training (which can obviously be very bad... sometimes there are wild differences in roles and training between different places).  Option B that is being considered is mimicking what is done in UK and Ireland and create a sub-class of perma-junior docs (they obviously dont call it that. Officially it's a way of getting "experience"). I have no reason to think it will work better than in the British isles. It might result in some improvement in working conditions for existing attendings in Spain by virtue of having more minions running around doing shit but it does break the Spanish training model and generates trouble downstream.
A THIRD idea being floated is to keep things as they are but issue a mandate forcing egressed trainees to mandatorily work for the goverment wherever the goverment wants after training. This goes against EU labor laws, ignores the fact that residents WORK during training which more than makes up for what they receive, and also ignores the fact that even now the chief reason people leave is that they are *not* offered jobs, or are offered part time jobs with the expectation they will work the full time hours without pay.  I dont think they *can* do it with EU law as it is now (they might if they and others manage to drive a change) but if they did I predict Spanish training schemes would become impopular, fast.

[LordBaal]

Medicine here is a public university only carreer. But was the one with the highest grading requirements. If you wanted to be a doctor you had to finish highschool with basically perfect grades. An average higher than 19.5 over 20 (we use/used a scale from 0 to 20 to grade), and even then there was not sure way of you getting in, the spots weren't that many and the waiting list rather large in comparison.

And then the carrer at uny itself was pretty brutal. Also only a handful of faculties are avaiable, in like 4 or 5 states I think. While the tuition fees were like cents of dollars per month/semester, you still had to buy lots of books and other things, most people studying it had to either work or have people supporting them.

5 years of brutal studies, one year of "intership" or residency im a public hospital, and one year of rural work, all of that unavoidable to graduate. Did I mention all the faculties were on the premises of the largest public hospitals on each of their respective cities? From very early students had access to very close experience and then hand on experience latter. This also more or less guaranteed a fresh supply of rookies free of pay each year on those hospitals.

All these were considered more than enough filters. Its evident, but have to say it was the higher drop out rate carreer of all.

As a plus, working with very few supplies/medicines and support. From very early these docs learned to be very recursive and develop nerves of steel because they knew they can lose any patient even over a simple inffection.

[Il Palazzo]

From very early these docs learned to be very recursive and develop nerves of steel because they knew they can lose any patient even over a simple inffection.

From very early these docs learned to be very recursive and develop nerves of steel because they knew they had to learn to be very recursive and develop nerves of steel.

[martinuzz]

The Dutch police have asked the government to stop the lockdowns and re-open horeca.
They are tired, understaffed, and sick of having to run to and end private parties at people's homes.
"You cannot stop the youth from needing social contact and entertainment. Please re-open the pubs, They did a great job before, with keeping risk to a minimum, contrary to all the illegal parties we see now".

[Starver]

Meanwhile (because our PM is over the barrel and needs to appease Covid-deniersjust-a-sniffle-rs) our plannwdvtrajectory out of restrictions is being shown to be probably premature.

Arguments will no doubt be made that these are just those not turning up (teachers and pupils) because they are currently ordered to stay away, so this problem will go away if they just stop the self-/household-isolation thing and let them attend regardlesz, but when you add the removal of the mask mandate (which was always under-applied/late-to-implement in schools before, during and between various prior waves, anyway) will not really help anything but the virus.

(Acknowledging that it always has problems for the likes of deaf pupils, especially, but there are ways to deal with that and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.)

[Iduno]

Meanwhile (because our PM is over the barrel and needs to appease Covid-deniersjust-a-sniffle-rs) our plannwdvtrajectory out of restrictions is being shown to be probably premature.

Arguments will no doubt be made that these are just those not turning up (teachers and pupils) because they are currently ordered to stay away, so this problem will go away if they just stop the self-/household-isolation thing and let them attend regardlesz, but when you add the removal of the mask mandate (which was always under-applied/late-to-implement in schools before, during and between various prior waves, anyway) will not really help anything but the virus.

(Acknowledging that it always has problems for the likes of deaf pupils, especially, but there are ways to deal with that and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.)

Where here in the US, enough teachers have died, gotten too sick to work, or are tired of seeing what happens to coworkers, so they can't keep schools open. The solution is to bring in the military as back-up teachers, because learning from home doesn't grease the wheels of capitalism enough.