The New Face of Healthcare - Why Nurses are in such high demand

[Glitter Brunello Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Glitter Brunello]

Good article.

The New Face of Health Care: Why Nurses Are in Such High Demand - Christine Mackey-Ross - Health - The Atlantic

[chriskre Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close chriskre]

Interesting article, although that's not what I am seeing being played out in our city. At least not in my hospital.

They dumped our CEO who was an MD and put a former Wells Fargo executive in charge of our hospital. You can imagine how a banker would run a hospital. He's running it right into the ground.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

Interesting article Glitter, thanks for posting.

We have an ageing workforce of nurses, I heard that something like 1 in 6 of our nurses are over 55 years old. I can only imagine the impact of large scale losses of expert knowledge and intellectual capital over the next decade. None of the nurses I know are discussing succession planning with their employers even though they are intending to retire in the next few years.

Interesting article, although that's not what I am seeing being played out in our city. At least not in my hospital.

They dumped our CEO who was an MD and put a former Wells Fargo executive in charge of our hospital. You can imagine how a banker would run a hospital. He's running it right into the ground.

I remember that model, "you don't need to be a ... insert any profession ... to run a business".

Now we seem to be looking for it all. Step up super-humans ...

So where are these new executives coming from? Their career routes are varied, from private practice and medical affairs offices to nursing leaders who worked their way up the organizational chart. Many of them returned to school to earn MBAs and degrees in finance so they can bring sharpened business skills to their new positions. They speak both clinical and financial languages to help the organization achieve full accountability in quality and safety. In addition to their patient care credentials, today's physician and nurse executives must be fluent in pro forma development, business plans, cost containment, staff productivity, and data mining.

[Tia Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Tia]

Interesting article, although that's not what I am seeing being played out in our city. At least not in my hospital.

They dumped our CEO who was an MD and put a former Wells Fargo executive in charge of our hospital. You can imagine how a banker would run a hospital. He's running it right into the ground.

Could be hope, ours had a CEO that was a former building contractor, they had planned to build a new facility. Well he lasted less then a year. Now we have a guy formerly from Quroum Quorum Health Resources and who btw has brought in Quorum in a consulting basis since. They say we will have that new facility in ~ 3 years. Time will tell as they just put into the Chief Nurse position a lady with no acute care background, was the director of the home health.

[jackio Gold Contributor Find all posts View Profile Close jackio]

Interesting article, and it would make sense that someone who understands the organization at the middle and lower end would make better decisions at the upper end.
Like Chris,I too am seeing the effects of severe cost cutting at our hospitals. Patient outcomes are really suffering.
Due to the economy, I see aging nurses who are staying on longer and not retiring. Here on Long Island, new RN grads are not getting jobs. Forget about LPNs. Also, there is a push for the hospitals to attain "magnet status" and they are only hiring RNs with bachelor degrees. Half of our nursing grads here are associate degree grads. It is not easy to start a career in nursing here anymore.

[ace2000 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close ace2000]

Patient outcomes are really suffering.

Do you have any facts to support this? With the consolidated data available today and information sharing, patient outcomes have been improving for a number of years. I am doubtful you can support that statement.

[BocaBum99 Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close BocaBum99]

Interesting article Glitter, thanks for posting.

We have an ageing workforce of nurses, I heard that something like 1 in 6 of our nurses are over 55 years old. I can only imagine the impact of large scale losses of expert knowledge and intellectual capital over the next decade. None of the nurses I know are discussing succession planning with their employers even though they are intending to retire in the next few years.

Are you taking a business course or reading Harvard Business Review?

"Succession Planning" and "Intellectual Capital" are terms NOT usually used in the context of nursing. Succession planning is for top management. Intellectual capital is the corporate asset of key resources that increase the market value of an organization above its book value.

The terms I would expect to see when discussing Nurses would be "Human Resource planning" and "skilled labor pool."

Nurses don't discuss succession planning. That is why none of the nurses you know are talking about it. They are rarely involved in the planning for a new CEO of a hospital. If you are talking about their own succession. That is usually handled by an HR VP along with the Chief Operating Officer, who by the way is usually included in discussions of succession planning.

I just did some quick research. It is true that there is a forecasted industry wide shortage of RNs. There are 4 drivers of this expected shortage.

1) Aging baby boomers who need more health care as they get older which increases the need.

2) Cost cutting in hospitals which are shifting work from high paid doctors to lower paid Nurse Practitioners.

3) ObamaCare increase of 32M newly insured patients driving new healthcare demand.

4) Struggles of Nursing colleges and Universities of expanding enrollment.

This shortage should result in significant increase in compensation for Nurses over the next 10-20 years as competent, qualified resources will be in short supply.

By the way, if the government just got out of the way of the free market, it would come up with its own solution to this problem. Anytime government gets involved, it just makes the problem worse.

[jackio Gold Contributor Find all posts View Profile Close jackio]

Do you have any facts to support this? With the consolidated data available today and information sharing, patient outcomes have been improving for a number of years. I am doubtful you can support that statement.

Just anecdotal - increases in c-diff and other nosocomial infections for example among patients I am aware of. Patient outcomes on the whole have improved as medical advances have been made, but cost-cutting measures are now putting patients at risk for secondary illness. One patient I know recently suffered aspiration pneumonia because she was supposed to have a one-on-one aide watching her and there was none available. The housekeeping staffs being cut. In the hospital where my daughter works, the same people that clean your bathrooms deliver the meal trays. Assuming that they all perform proper handwashing, they do not wear different clothes to perform both tasks.
When I began practicing, we never put "dirty" (medical) patients in with "clean" (surgical) ones, as an infection control measure. That has gone by the wayside. My friend's mother was put in with a male roommate, which gave her stress that can hinder healing.

I don't have any hard data, but being in the profession I see and hear of increasing risks being taken that can negatively affect outcome.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

"Succession Planning" and "Intellectual Capital" are terms NOT usually used in the context of nursing. Succession planning is for top management. Intellectual capital is the corporate asset of key resources that increase the market value of an organization above its book value.

The terms I would expect to see when discussing Nurses would be "Human Resource planning" and "skilled labor pool."

Thanks for the information.

My friends in the medical field tend to wear multiple hats. Doctors who own and run medical clinics which are also teaching clinics. A Dental Nurse who bought a Dental Practice and employs 2 Dentists and a staff. A self employed Dentist who employs staff and also runs a farming business. Manufacturers of medical supplies who also provide training to medical students. Our conversations tend to revolve around small business where everyone gets to say how things should be run. The Nurse Practitioners who are thinking about retirement are employees of a major hospital, so you have explained why they haven't informed their employer. I thought they would have more input and influence than they clearly have.

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

Anytime government gets involved, it just makes the problem worse.

My mom (an RN) got so frustrated by the paperwork as the 1980's rolled on. She used to sign out and then do another hour or so of paper work because she felt doing the paperwork while signed in meant she'd have to neglect her patients. She and my cousin (another RN, who I believe went to the same college) have talked a lot about how things have changed over the years, and while some of the changes have been for the good (in mom's day the nurses were trained to walk a few paces behind the doctor, and never to speak up when the doctor is wrong ), the medicaid/medicare/whatever paperwork coming between nurse and patient is still a big negative.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

There has been a series of articles about Nursing in The Independent (UK newspaper) by Christina Patterson. Here is one I found interesting -

The nurses who taught an ailing hospital how to care - Health News - Health & Families - The Independent

Part of the article:

The first thing she noticed when she took charge, she told me over a cup of tea, was the "disempowerment" of the "senior nurse force". Their "recognition" and "power base" had, she said, been "eroded". Nurses, she said, no longer had loyalty to the hospital, but to the university where they'd trained. "We're just the placement now," she explained, "and the people who went through that system didn't have that recognition of having a presence, and a status."

"Ten years ago," said Cheryl Lenney, the trust's director of nursing for adults, "we could probably say the areas in the trust where we're not sure we'd want our families to be cared for." Now, she said, there wasn't anywhere in the organisation she wouldn't be happy for a relative to be treated. "We have", said Heaton, "a very simple philosophy. 'Is it good enough for me and my family?' We make it," she said, "very clear that we aspire to be the best trust in the country. But," she added, "we're not."

If they're not quite the best, they're very clearly near it. Their infection control, which used to be "the absolute pits", is now used as a model for other hospitals. They're the best-performing trust for colorectal cancer. Four days before my visit, they were assessed by the NHS Litigation Authority, and were awarded a level 3, which is "exceptional". And when the Care Quality Commission visited last year, they gave such a glowing assessment that Heaton actually asked them if they were sure they were that good. The answer, apparently, was yes. "They said the thing that really strikes us about here is the quality, the care, and the consistency of delivery, but also that staff are really happy."

Ten years ago, according to Heaton, there was "no consistency, no structure, and no oversight". So she set about putting all these things in place. Nurses who weren't doing their jobs well were moved into "more appropriate roles". Others were encouraged to leave. Heaton restored the nursing structure, so that there was "a clear line of accountability". She also set about making sure that everybody was clear what the management expected. "There is", she said, "an absolute flaw in making an assumption that people know what they're doing, and that they're doing their job, and that they're doing it well."

A very big part of this has been about setting standards and looking for ways to make care better. They used, for example, schemes like "productive ward", developed by an organisation called the NHS Institute for Improvement and Innovation, to look at ways to "take time out of non-patient-facing processes, and tasks". They were trying, she said, "to put a kind of performance profile" on "quality of care". They also developed their own "patient feedback devices", and built up whole banks of "quality care round data". And in the end, they decided to draw on all the different schemes they'd tried out, to develop their own.

What they came up with was the "ward accreditation" scheme, which rates each ward as gold, silver or bronze. Or, in the absence of any of these, white. "It is", said Heaton, "about mainstreaming how you work, and constantly trying to improve it. .....the article continues ......

Here are some others:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...g-7628075.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...n-7628093.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...n-7637490.html

[stan2u Member Find all posts View Profile Close stan2u]

This might surprise you all, but here (Washington state) the LATEST trend is that we are having a surplus of nurses. That is, nurses - new grads and others entering the market - are having trouble finding jobs. This will probably be temporary, but it's a combination of new programs graduating a lot more nurses and hospitals/clinics making cutbacks resulting in existing nurses being let go.

[chriskre Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close chriskre]

This might surprise you all, but here (Washington state) the LATEST trend is that we are having a surplus of nurses. That is, nurses - new grads and others entering the market - are having trouble finding jobs. This will probably be temporary, but it's a combination of new programs graduating a lot more nurses and hospitals/clinics making cutbacks resulting in existing nurses being let go.

Not surprising at all. It's going on all over the country.
Nursing school is BIG business right now. Actually anything allied health is big business right now. Schools are churning out students and making student loans like the banks were making mortgages a few years ago before the bubble burst. I wonder when the student loan bubble is gonna break.

Well by the end of the month our hospital is laying off 550 nurses. I can tell you that patient care is and will be even more so, adversely affected. We are already seeing things happen that should never ever happen and it's because there is no one watching your loved ones. So sorry for anyone who is really sick these days. It ain't pretty.

[Tia Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Tia]

...by the end of the month our hospital is laying off 550 nurses. I can tell you that patient care is and will be even more so, adversely affected. We are already seeing things happen that should never ever happen and it's because there is no one watching your loved ones. So sorry for anyone who is really sick these days. It ain't pretty.

So a facility in Miami is laying off 550 nsg staff? Any administration?

Nearly a year ago a teenager we know was in one of our facilities for 2 weeks, pneumonia, and it was scary the minimal staff working. If you have a loved one in a hospital might be best someone stay with them.

[chriskre Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close chriskre]

So a facility in Miami is laying off 550 nsg staff? Any administration?

Nearly a year ago a teenager we know was in one of our facilities for 2 weeks, pneumonia, and it was scary the minimal staff working. If you have a loved one in a hospital might be best someone stay with them.

Yeah, not just nursing. The nurses were hit the hardest but all departments were affected. 1100 in total.

We are still very top heavy and they are giving our President a "bonus" for the good work he's doing laying everyone off. He's getting 400K for his dirty deeds. This is something that the county has been wanting to do for years. They have been trying to bust up the union and lower salaries and benefits. I guess with the perfect storm of the economy they are finally in a position to do it.
Dade Commission Won’t Interfere With JMH Layoffs CBS Miami

So yeah, we are becoming like a third world hospital where your family has to be at your side 24/7 cause nobody else will be. Oh and pretty soon they'll have to bring you food and medicine cause we're on credit hold with everyone under the sun. 250 "incidents" since the furloughs began. That's alot of mishaps.