She's currently working as a residential assistant at rather nice elderly care facility where they are short staffed. She makes about what she would make at a fast food restaurant despite working in a semi-skilled position(requires CNA credentials) and working with COVID positive residents. They are just now discussing possible pay raises.
The pandemic experience is likely to push people out of health care and result in even less people choosing it as a career unless compensation and the workload changes. This comes just as the baby boomers are reaching an age when they'll start to need serious care.
The elderly who are already retied and likely have a fixed monthly expenditure?
Meanwhile, even for increasing salaries for nurses in the health care industry, in the USA the improved image has to have a positive profit-based motivation.
I hope one day it does, but until then “who’s gonna pay for the salary increase?”
We cannot move on until we eliminate all this mass testing. Yes test for confirmation before administering something specific to Covid but testing somebody whose only medical issue is something that can be bought over the counter… what is the point?
All this testing is just causing chaos in peoples lives.
This has been the entire point of mitigation efforts from day one.
What useful information does knowing you have Covid instead of the myriad of other respiratory viruses actually provide? The treatment for all of them is gonna be basically the same for like 99% of all cases.
I personally look at the raw data of death. I believe that most data you would get around COVID have bias, and only overall data speak the truth.
Look at what happened in Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps (This does not include hospitalizations) First of, you realize that the pandemic is not at all what we have been told. We can observe an increase in death in the winters, but somewhere like peaks with 10% more deaths than the years beforehand.
You realize that for the 0-44 age group, there has been NO PANDEMIC. So from the beginning, we should just let this age group live normally. (no mask, no restrictions, no mandatory vaccine, no pass, no isolation)
Then comes the other age groups > 44, that did have excess death especially during winters. We should focus on the care to them and allow them to have a better access to their doctor, even when positive. Equip all of them with early treatment pack (antiviral and antibiotics for the first phase, anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory for the second). Provide them access to vaccines, only if they want to take them as it is an experimental treatment.
The main reason why the hospitals got over populated is because we told people to isolate and not see their doctors. They wait to be really sick and have no choice than going to the hospital.
Then come the health structure. We should just double the wages of all the nurses, auxiliary, GP, emergency doctors. Allow quick formations for unemployed and military to become auxiliary.
And if you think we cannot pay for that, think about the cost of a single day of nation wide lockdown.
It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically. You can pay them 10x and the number won't change. We only have so many medical schools, and so many people willing to throw themselves on the sword to get through them.
Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point.
In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road.
I don't think that's true. If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help.
> I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years
The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care.
I just have the compulsive need as the son of a nurse, who is now dating a nurse: nurses could use the monetary incentive, too.
And I have to feel the vast amount of regulatory paperwork doctors (and other medical providers) have to go through is a constant nagging discouragement. I mean, I think that evolved for good reasons, to help create accountability to to ease care when the patient enters a different part of the system, but holy crap, it’s a lot of forms to fill out as a medical care worker.
1) No matter how much the pay goes up for doctors, medical schools are still only going to have so much capacity, capacity which is artificially constrained. We are already at a place where many more people that are highly competent and intelligent want to be doctors than are actually able to become doctors simply because of medical school bandwidth.
2) Work:Pay ratio is already higher depending on the kind of medicine you do, but even lower pay programs still have no problem filling up.
The issue in the US clearly is not incentive, it's the obstacles, both administrative and personal. I could go on a rant about not every doctor needing to be the best and brightest, but that'd be off topic.
> The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care.
Seeing as how that's near the end of life expectancy, demand for care should actually start to fall in the near future. Maybe it increases slightly short term, but we'll be on the other side of that in less than 10 years.
When I say "resources", people are included in that. Human resources one might call it.
> Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point. In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road.
I understand what you mean but I think you greatly underestimate how many nurses work contract and are not employed by hospitals. Almost all nurses I know, and I know quite a few, are all working as contractors for agencies. The hospital assignments are just almost never worth it.
When have we ( assuming you are US, forgive me ) ever devoted resources to anything other than the military industrial complex and tax-cuts for the rich?
We don't HAVE resources. We have already scraped out every piece of public spending and public works program out of our budgets.
You expect us to be able to just scale back up after systematically disassembling our university[0] and medical systems over the past 30 years?
OK, we increase capacity. We save a few people, so what? We are running a BUSINESS HERE. We can't have any extra capacity, that would cut into profits! Plus we are still low after paying $600 per insulin shot last month.
Besides, haven't you heard? Everyone made a killing off the pandemic! It was great for business! BCBS posted 2 billion in profit last year! Don't worry your little head: Our healthcare and technology CEOs didn't have to sell their private jets or wait on buying that new yacht they have been eyeing.
This is what neoliberalism looks like. Every drop of blood drained out of public spending, so we can reroute it to whoever gives our senators the largest bribe.
0: Which creates professionals upon which US healthcare depends
There would be a perception for a lot of the time that the cost of all of these things is wasteful - whether you're talking about public or private healthcare.
Not being able to say when the next pandemic might occur is going to make it a hard sell - how do you tell taxpayers or shareholders that you need to keep extra staff on retainer for something that may not happen for 100 years?
If you put these extra staff to use on other types of (non-essential) healthcare, then you're going to have to cancel all of that when the next pandemic happens. That will then lead to backlogs as operations are cancelled, screening isn't carried out etc. - and you're back to healthcare having to shut down.
Also, what do you plan for? Not every pandemic is the same.
What I wish we focused on instead, is the medical system as a whole. We've been hearing stories everyday about how hospitals are on the brink of collapse. Why, in 2 years of this pandemic, have we not devoted the resources to expanding bed capacity and staffing hospitals? Why is testing still so unsustainable? From day 1 of the pandemic, from social distancing, to masking, to now getting vaccinated, the messaging has been do all of these things to avoid overwhelming the hospitals so it seems weird to me that 2 years later the messaging is exactly the same.