Yup, you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Nurses are the fabric of the hospital and we're systematically cutting them down.Mayabird wrote: The problems with nurses are twofold: firstly, there aren't nearly enough, and there aren't any good ways to make up the shortage without massively increasing medical costs (and of course that's a big no-no.) Nurses are underpaid and underappreciated, so not many people go into it, and of those a lot of the good ones are driven away because they can't make enough (and could easily get more survivable wages in some other less stressful medical field) while also being overworked. To cut costs, a lot of hospitals, even the one in my podunk hometown, are recruiting foreign nurses from Nigeria and the Phillipines. A lot of them (not all, but a frighteningly large number) do not have a firm enough grasp of English (spoken or written) but because a lot of hospitals are just trying to get warm bodies they don't care, so errors start to pile up. Add that to them being given the responsibility of too many patients (five or six at a time IIRC is the optimal number, but seven or eight can be done in a pinch, while many nurses regularly are supposed to care for more patients than that, and they can't do a good job with that many people).
So what happens is you have overworked overstressed nurses who may not be the highest quality who aren't for a combination of reasons giving good basic care to patients, but those little things that they fail to do can end up fatal (a wrong medication, forgetting that a patient has a food allergy, not having time to check in on a patient to make sure they're doing alright, etc.).
It's not the whole story, but no one else is talking about it.
We have a deficit of doctors, and within 20 years we're going to have a serious problem as pretty much all of the old guard disappears and a number of fields are going to be left holding the bill. But everyone overlooks nurses. When a hospital or county says they need doctors, they need nurses to help carry out the doctors orders. A doctor cannot stay with a patient in the hospital 24/7, they need nurses to administer and care but there's a HUGE HUGE HUGE deficit of trained/registered nurses. And the quality of the incoming nurses is not looking good either.
