> Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA.

This has always been a systemic problem of how hard medical education and license are to get. I'm pretty sure medical personnel can be trained to reasonable (mediocre but better than nothing) skill level much faster and for much cheaper than it normally is.

Yeah, if the problem is lack of staff in COVID wards, just start COVID-specific training programs and hire COVID-specific personnel, who are only allowed to work with COVID patients. That should reduce training time a lot.

This approach might sound like some completely out of the box, untested and extreme approach, yet it’s completely standard in industries that are not as heavily regulated as medicine is. Alas, healthcare has its Rules and Procedures and Best Practices, and as a result, everyone else must adjust and implement novel approaches, so that the healthcare industrial and regulatory complex doesn’t have to.

The vast majority of COVID patients aren't just "COVID patients". They're people with comorbidities that put them in a more serious position than a regular (otherwise healthy) individual with a respiratory illness. To "specialize" in COVID you likely need to have training on diabetes, neuro, renal, cardiac and other systems. To a certain point, you just need a fully trained nurse because you can't specialize too deeply on "COVID" without needing training on the comorbidties that come along with an ICU patient.

I guess I'm bias because my spouse is an ICU RN, but the ignorance of HN comments boggles my mind. Do all the hackers try to solve domain problems they have absolutely 0 experience in? I don't pretend to have solutions for the healthcare system because I don't work in the healthcare domain. I can assure you, the red tape that exists is there for very good reasons, because we've tried "unregulated" systems and they were a disaster. We've learned from our mistakes, and that means rigor that can't be replaced by some keyboard jockey writing webdev or embedded systems for unrelated fields.

And knowing they are going to get laid off when COVID dies down, do you expect people to be stampeding to be hired to a job with no transferable skills? Have you seen the Medicaid nursing home labor pool?

> That's not an option. Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA.

How did this understaffing happen?

> More than 260 hospitals and health systems furloughed workers in the last year, and many others implemented layoffs.

[0]: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/20-hospitals-l...

As someone whose partner is a med-surg nurse, and whose extended friend circle contains a lot of current and (mostly)former nurses, that post is not really the case. That's like saying that the shortage of software engineers is down to InfoSys having a bunch of IT layoffs.

The big issues are: the job sucks, the patients suck, the insurance companies suck, the hospital administration sucks. It's a hard, thankless job, where you get shit on all day by everyone, figuratively and literally, and for not much pay. Pre-COVID, pay was maybe $30-35/hr for most floor jobs. Or you could get an hospital office job, making more than that working a basic 9-5, no shit, no working holidays, no lawsuits (due to bone-headed coworkers fucking up), no feeling like a waiter, or being groped by patients.

Nursing is a terrible career anymore.