Spaulding wrote:
Clawmaster wrote:
One thing is for sure, it had a tremendous impact on the US healthcare system that nobody is really acknowledging or has a plan to deal with and there are certainly no smart people at the state of federal level that have any idea how to deal with the issue.
What do you mean?
Will give you the 500 foot and the 50,000 foot views.
Had several experienced RN's leave my unit during COVID, then several more leave soon after, and then several more leave during the past sixmonths, this is a system wide problem, when you are running at 50% staffing levels it certainly impacts care.
Then you throw in the nationwide numbers showing that the crisis will only get worse over the next few years and you eventually get into situations where there will not be enough RN's to safely operate hospital units. Already see smaller hospitals divert patients to us because they do not have enough staff to provide care, this is also true of SNF's, which causes us to keep people in the hospital longer because there is nowhere to discharge them for rehab.
The bigger places are able to overpay for travel RN staff, but that creates an almost mercenary approach to providing health care to human beings, most of my younger staff have already left to join travel companies, many of these nurses had only one year of acute care experience and were not exactly experts by any means, so you get inexperienced people chasing contracts that have no allegiance to the communities they are working in, so you can imagine how that impacts patient care/outcomes.
In many ways COVID has completely changed the entire acute healthcare system, but most people have no idea this is going on and will only find out if they have to access the system. The hospital administrators and state/federal politicians are nowhere near smart enough to figure this out, so it falls on those of us working on the front lines to try to make it work, that is until we get sick of it and bail. There are ways this could be mitigated, but the state/federal decision makers will continue to rely on the academic figurehead types whose lack of vision has created this environment in the first place, so expect it to get much worse before it gets better.
Did appreciate Biden using some of my fellow medical professionals as props during his campaign, but it seems he has forgot about healthcare completely and is instead focused on....well not really sure what he is focused on these days.