Current Events > Why in the right mind would anyone quit a job like nursing?

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lolife67 posted...

Nurses diagnose patients and read charts, too. Physicians just sign off on them.

No the hell they don't, unless you're talking about midlevel providers like nurse practitioners, who not only diagnose, but can prescribe medication and order labs.

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My mom was an LPN for 25 years and she made good money but it was damn hard work and lots of hours.

The way I see it is that nurses do a lot of the routine grunt work, taking blood and attaching drips and attending the general body of patients for their daily needs. The bulk of caring for admitted patients falls to nurses, many of whom do long, unforgiving shifts.

In my experience, doctors tend to have weekends off short of an emergency, and while they do the initial diagnosis and make time to attend to their admitted patients, you're seeing a nurse most of the time you're in hospital. Doctors get to go home at night, the nursing staff is there 24 hours a day.

You need doctors and the expertise they have to diagnose and treat, absolutely. They're paid the big bucks for a reason - they're specialists. But nurses are absolute packhorses, doing a majority of the work that comes with the job on a 24 hour time schedule, with shifts that can approach 12 hours at a time depending on the staffing situation at their place of work.

The issue with cutting public health funding is that the nurses who do that essential work don't get paid properly, hospital equipment never gets updated which means the work can't be carried out efficiently, nurses tend not to have any recourse when they're treated badly by patients or co-workers, and hospitals will cut nursing staff to an absolute minimum and keep the least amount of people on call working the longest shifts legally allowed to save money. You can make some great money in the short-term, but do the short-term benefits make up for the hardships in the long run?

So if your cousin or whatever has taken a look at their profession and gone "I can't do this as a career", I don't blame them. Whether the money is going towards them or the places they work, nurses are the people who most feel the pinch when healthcare services are underfunded - right next to patients. They cope with belligerent people, they deal with piss and shit and blood on a daily basis, and they work longer hours than you or me on average.

There's plenty of reasons not to want to be a nurse.

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I've dated some nurses. It seems to take a pretty brutal psychological toll on them.

But for what it is, the pay is great for my area, at least. They are making real money. I'm guessing if you're obsessed with 6 figure payout you're living on one of the coasts.

And because of the 12 hour shifts they generally get a few days off in a row. That sounds nice to somebody like me, who works an office job that most certainly is not routine clock in clock out.

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-Seeing people die and suffer regularly sucks
-Dealing with blood, piss, shit, puss, vomit, etc sucks
-Being assaulted/hit (intentionally or not) by delirious, insane, perverted or seizing patients sucks
-A lot of verbal and other harassment and mistreatment from patients too
-Dealing with the families of patients sucks
-Dealing with vast amounts of bureaucracy, laws, ancient computer systems sucks
-Literally a pandemic ongoing
-Medicine is becoming increasingly politicized
-Long demanding shifts

Gee I wonder why

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I have been a dialysis nurse for almost 11 years. Most I ever grossed was 117K. That was 2020 so yeah. Other than that I'm around 90k. Not too bad considering I could get paid more in the big city but cost of living here in my town isn't too expensive so it balances out

Super Saiyan 3 Goku posted...

No the hell they don't, unless you're talking about midlevel providers like nurse practitioners, who not only diagnose, but can prescribe medication and order labs.

I literally mentioned mid-levels in my previous post. So yes, I was speaking of them.