Nurse Shortage

Joe Doakes from Como parks emails:Joe Doakes from Como parks emails:

Hospitals are bringing in foreigners to do the nursing work Americans won’t do.

The article implies the reason for the nursing shortage is that American nurses are tired from working so hard taking care of Covid patients. They’re quitting in exhaustion. Apparently, they will never recover, never return to work, therefore we must replace them with nurses brought in from overseas. Foreign nurses are much more durable, more resilient, I guess. They aren’t quitters. They’re willing to work.

Who believes this rot?

If we’re worried about a nurse staffing shortage, maybe we shouldn’t be firing nurses during a pandemic for violating a vaccine mandate? Particularly not over a vaccine which doesn’t prevent the spread of an illness which is basically just a bad flu. Another example of the endless lack of Second Order Thinking in the Brandon administration.

Joe Doakes

Why, yes – it does seem a little bit like the right hand doesn’t know what stories the left-hand is telling.

21 thoughts on “Nurse Shortage

  1. About a month ago, I saw a quote from a couple of nurses: “In a REAL pandemic, hospitals are hiring doctors and nurses as fast as they can find them, not firing them”.

    I also heard a report on Monday that said nursing homes were so short on staff, that they would hire WuFlu positive nurses, as long as they were asymptomatic.

  2. I think, JD, the descriptor you were looking for is compliant. Foreign nurses are much more compliant.

  3. “Nobody could have estimated the degree to which healthcare workers would be dealing with largely preventable infections,”~ Joanne Spetz, director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at The University of California at San Francisco

    “Other trends that have drawn headlines, such as the firing of unvaccinated medical workers, or requirements that staff exposed to the virus be quarantined, did not show up as significant long-term causes of staffing shortages.”
    https://www.barrons.com/articles/omicron-variant-nursing-shortage-healthcare-51640653607

  4. Someone should do a study of how much “health care” is from largely preventable actions.

  5. I’ve been in the health insurance world since the early 2000s. Saw a stat ten years or so ago and at that time, 80 some percent of medical claims were lifestyle related, I.E. smoking and obesity. In other words, what you put in your mouth.

  6. Were there any communicable diseases involved with those medical claims that were lifestyle choices ie: hypertension, smoking, obesity or drug use?

  7. Following the ‘what you put in your mouth’ theme…Hepatitis, HIV/AIDS.what you’re talking about?

  8. You! You unvaxxed nurse! You are fired!
    You! You totally vaxxed and boosted nurse! You tested positive for covid! 5 day suspension!

  9. My eldest daughter is a nurse, and she sees a lot of foreign nurses coming down the pike due to staffing issues. Regarding what’s going on now, you’ve got the vaccine mandates (that won’t do much good if I can tell) taking out 1-2% of staff (which is actually much bigger impact than you’d think as they were leanly staffed already), infections like COVID taking out another 5% or so temporarily, and then you’ve got overwork leading to nurses ending up disabled. I don’t know how big an effect that is, but I do know that it does play into what goes on.

    And quite frankly, as an engineer by trade, I’m happy if nurses start taking the H1B slots…..well, at least if they don’t expand the number, and that’s almost a gimme these days. Really, to be serious, for a long time, the tendency in government has been to give nice big favors to big business, generally at the expense of their employees. I want to see good, qualified foreigners come here, because they often contribute a lot to our society, but not in the “indentured servitude”/”slavery” that an H1B visa often entails.

    (I’m borrowing that quoted phrase from a citizen who got his start with H1B….the topic came up, and I was very pleasantly surprised that he described the program exactly as I would have)

  10. I have a family member who is an ICU nurse. She recently left her position to become a travel nurse. Her pay is nearly $7500/wk. She’ll make in 3 months (as a travel nurse) what it took a year to make (including OT) with her previous employer.

  11. A sane immigration policy is: admit those we have decided suit our needs, not their needs.
    An insane immigration policy, currently supported by all the dems and half the GOP, is the immigrants decide if our country suits their needs.

  12. I am an adult human being. If someone offers me a vax, I can judge the potential upsides and down sides and make up my mind.
    But if I choose not to get vaxxed, and the person who has offered to vax me then says, “well, it’s not just about you.” you wonder if it is a common good goal to get me vaxxed, whether it is good or bad for me doesn’t really matter. There can very well be a conflict between what I have determined is good for me and what the state has determined what is good for the collective.
    This kind of conflict isn’t rare, but in a democracy, the way that you decide when the state may override my concerns for the good of the people is that you have a debate among the people’s representatives who can then vote yes or no on some compromise.
    Biden’s vax mandate violates democratic norms. The executive is not a legislator.

  13. Bikebubba and MP, your comments about sensible immigration reminded me that in the past, Progressives hated Americans stealing smart people from other nations. It was a Brain Drain – nobody left overseas but the dummies who are too stupid to run a civilization leaving them to languish in ignorance, poverty, disease and despair.

    Which is not a racist or elitist thing to say, of course, it only sounds that way. We’re bagging on America, so it’s fine. As is stealing nurses, because we need them. We’re not the villains here. This is a crisis of the unvaxxed. Blame them.

  14. “I have a family member who is an ICU nurse. She recently left her position to become a travel nurse. Her pay is nearly $7500/wk.”

    I call this pure B.S.!! from what I’ve read the average GP Doctor makes ~ $300k/yr. and the avg. Travel Nurse is about $108k/yr.

    We’ve known that shortages of doctors and nurses were in our future as the baby boom generation got closer to retirement age. Care for the elderly is where the need for medical professionals will be going forward.

  15. Regarding the wages of traveling nurses, while I hate to back Emery up, it is true that, yes, many traveling nurses are now getting wages that exceed those of many doctors. It causes huge problems at hospitals because too many of them come in not knowing from Shinola, but get paid 2-4x more than their peers. Before the epidemic and mass resignations due to stress/COVID/vaccinations/etc.., what Scott said was true, but now things are shooting through the roof. Hence pressure to use H1B and such for nurses.

  16. So Minneapolis and Saint Paul have introduced vax passports for events, dining, and bars.
    Beginning in a week, by which time the mostly harmless Xi wave will have passed.
    Typical idiotic response. All they understand is mandates that destroy businesses, bully individuals, and all without affecting the spread of the disease. I mean, my God, we know that vaxxing doesn’t stop you from spreading or catching covid, What they are trying to stop is people missing work because they have a positive test, after they mandate that a positive test means that you stay home for ten 5 days.
    And the witless “public health officials” are recommending that if you have a cough or fever and test negative on a home test, go in for a PCR test, which ought to clog things up even more, and expose others to covid if you have it. Wear your little mask at the test center, lol.
    Before I retires, I used to go into work sick with bronchitis or the flu. I didn’t want to, but it was the nature of the job. In the niche my job was in, it was virtually impossible to replace me in less than 72 hours. Cost to the organization would have been $50,000 for each shift I missed until they found someone to replace me & that person had acclimatized to high altitude work. So I almost never called in sick. I retired with 700 hours of sick time on the books.
    One day there will be hundreds of papers written and books published on the topic of just how badly “public health officials” f*cked up the government response to covid with arbitrary mandates, confused messaging, and, in creating the pandemic by pushing for coronavirus research in Chinese labs with known safety problems.

  17. Speaking as a 62 year old male, I am greatly in favor of giving H1B1 visas to young, cute foreign nurses.
    The nations health care system may depend on it. Let’s not be squeamish, here.

  18. My daughter just went to work for a totally private outfit in the burbs. They don’t have a vaccine mandate, they are very well staffed with experienced health care workers who basically came there because of the no-vax policy. They do not have a health care worker shortage at that facility. Go figure.

  19. MP, I hate to drag you down, but the proper name for the new variant is, after all, Omicron. Why? Because if it were the (chairman) Xi variant, it would have to be significantly more lethal, don’t you think?

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