People who are sick, in pain, or possibly dying might be slightly less emotionally regulated than your typical customer.

It doesn't help that hospital systems tend to be garbage at customer service, so the person's been told to wait an indefinite (but always very long) period without any indication of how long it'll be, and asked to tediously fill out the same information five different times on five different pieces of paper and iPads, all while feeling terrible, before they finally snap at a poor nurse who isn't to blame for their hospital being an uncaring money-making machine with little regard for humanity.

You didn’t even mention the anxiety patients are enduring over the billing the entire time.

And now they will be billed even more because nobody wants to do the job anymore!

Healthcare workers are not slaves they can quit after all.

Incidentally, Nurses organized by Finnish labour unions are currenlty planning to quit en masse since they weren't allowed to go on strike. Forecasts indicate we'll have a total collapse of the healthcare system by summer unless negotiators manage some kind of breakthrough in the negotiations.

Good on them. It is terrible for society when nurses, fire department and police officers go on strike but it is the only way to change the system.

And in my experience it is not even about the money most of the time but more the work pressure and conditions.

Yeah, from what I hear, salary's a big part of it but the main problem is understaffing and constant overtime.

I've spoken with nurses who've had a variety of other jobs at other types of places. They are consistent in telling me that working as a nurse is a worse environment in the way they are treated.

The example stories they have shared are the type of thing I can't relate to and I've worked in software, general engineering, food service, construction, and tech support (I answered calls for 3 years).

This is also my experience being married to a nurse. Any story I have about a boss, coworker, or client being a jerk, she has about five stories about someone being bad enough that I'd already be shooting resumes toward anyone who will take me.

She's been punched in the face by a patient, she's had coworkers who sabotage each other due to personal vendettas, she's had bosses go on racist tirades in meetings, and on and on and on. As I remind my wife whenever she has a particularly awful day, there's a reason why the classic NP-hard CS problem is literally named the Nurse Scheduling Problem[1]. And yes, she's considering a career change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem

Yes, my wife has also been punched working in the hospital. She now does nursing by phone where people are still really awful to her, but at least they can't assault her.

All customer-facing positions have to deal with rude customers. Very few of those positions specifically select for customers with a high correlation to selfish and/or antisocial conspiratorial behavior. Almost all COVID hospitalizations are unvaccinated, and there's a very large (if not majority) portion among that population that chose not to vaccinate for entirely selfish reasons, and another large portion who have been actively consuming media telling them the members of the medical profession are the enemy. You'd be hard pressed to select for a more adversarial customer base.

This isn't particularly reasonable analysis. A large chunk of the unvaccinated population is elderly and contraindicated for vaccination or in hospice care. From talking with nurses, the elderly population has its own set of problems and frustrations. Imagine trying to administer care to someone who has no idea why they're in a hospital setting. Similarly, vaccination status in American COVID-hospitalization research classifies people of unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated. These people are often homeless, isolated and elderly, or mentally unwell and unable to provide reliable information to caregivers. Again, likely unpleasant to work with.

Grouping these people as conspiratorial is unfair and seems politically motivated. While you definitely have some overlap with conspiratorial people, people have a right to be skeptical of medical care, which is often incorrect and potentially life threatening. Being able to explain things concisely and with evidence is a core skill for a nurse, much like being able to explain to someone why their technical decisions are setting them up for failure is a core skill for a software architect.

But from talking to nurses, this isn't the drive for negative workplace satisfaction. Patients who are hospitalized are less likely to be mentally stable: many pathways to hospitalization come from extremely poor decision making, and many of these people are repeatedly hospitalized. Combine this with the fact that it's a very physical job, primarily handled by women, and you have a multi-faceted problem that's not as easy to solve as just giving people right-think.

Personally I think the pathway to fixing this is appropriately valuing nursing care, what is often a highly-skilled profession with large physical, legal, and downstream risk, and compensating people appropriately. While nursing is a disproportionately paid job relative to educational requirements, current compensation really doesn't accurately account for just how demanding a job it is.

The amount of nurses you see who become addicted to painkillers, benzos, etc., is truly sad. Much like teaching, it's an area where I feel that society is inaccurately evaluating what the overall impact could be if the role functioned well.

Yeah I don’t know about that bud. Try telling the spouse of a dying person that their half baked ideas they read on Facebook aren’t valid and tell me their meltdowns are comparable to working retail.

All jobs suck donkey dick, but jobs directly dealing with sick and dying people are on a different level.

Most industries are neither tasked with restoring health nor with being the bearer of hard truths about a person's health. I think it stands to reason that healthcare can be a particularly toxic environment for those reasons.

Half of the toxic problem is from the people being treated. The other half (and sometimes more than half) is from management and co-workers (i.e. doctors). Not all doctors are bad but enough of them are to make an impact.

There's a culture problem there.

Absolutely. In case it wasn't clear: I was saying that just dealing with peoples' health makes for a fundamentally stressful and potentially toxic environment, even if each individual in question is perfectly kind and reasonable.

Mistreatment by doctors and management isn't excused by that, but I think it can be seen (partially) through that lens.

Health care seems to be part of the institutions that are of no use to certain cults. It's part of the effort to dismantle the administrative state and reserve health care for the 1%.