<p>On one hand, I read that nurses are in high demand and easily employable, so nursing programs at colleges are typically oversubscribed or impacted.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I read evidence that nurses tend not to be very happy with their employment – they formed unions, and the unions frequently go on strike.</p>
<p>If hospitals and medical offices needed more nurses, wouldn’t they improve pay and working conditions both to compete for nurses and to reduce their tendency to be dissatisfied enough to form unions and strike? Conversely, if pay and working conditions are poor enough that nurses form unions and strike, wouldn’t that deter people from going into nursing, reducing the impaction in the nursing programs at colleges?</p>
<p>Also, in our state, despite all the talk about nursing shortages, they just want EXPERIENCED nurses because they don’t want to train. They also don’t want TOO senior nurses because they don’t wxnt to pay them too much. It’s a very tough profession, especially with shift work that causes health problems for the workers.</p>
<p>We have many of the CCs, state U and private U.S. all graduating nurses but they can’t get jobs until they go elsewhere for experience. </p>
<p>Many of the nurses I know are very stressed at their jobs and feel understaffed and sometimes undertrained. One of them had 2 heart attacks by age 40 and he’s trim, exercises, is ideal weight and a vegetarian. He’s still nursing!</p>
<p>There is no longer a shortage! So many people have gone into nursing in the last decade that the nursing whole has been filled. New grads always had an easy time of finding employment. Nurses typically had jobs lined up before graduation. Now? They have to hunt tirelessly for sometimes up to 2 years to find a job. This was unheard of in the past. Many young women are going to school for their BSNs which cost $40-$50,000/year to attend and the most that many will earn is $70,000/ year tops with experience. The pay is low compared to the huge amount of responsibility that one has. It’s an incredibly tough profession. </p>
<p>Going the ASN route has become a bit of a waste because hospitals only want those with a BSN. </p>
<p>I worked with a nurse who is fairly new to the profession, she was a hair dresser in the past & says she misses being a hair dresser and the pay was better. </p>
<p>Another who has been a nurse for 3 years also works at Yale U in the dining halls. She makes more in the dining hall! Something is wrong with this picture!</p>
<p>I agree with NewHavenCtMom. New grads have it tough. Hospitals no longer want to put the time and effort into hiring and training new grads. They also prefer BSNs over the ADNs, who may be just as good. Nurse to patient ratios are terrible at many places, so nurses get stressed and burn out. </p>
<p>Doctor’s offices rarely ever hire nurses anymore. They use MAs who cost less. Many MAs either refer to themselves as nurses (illegal in many states) or don’t correct them when people call them nurses. </p>
<p>I was hired at a great time. I got intensive training in a critical care internship and worked in an area with strict nurse to patient ratios that could not be altered by nursing supervisors (who often feel pressured to admit patients to units regardless of staffing). I’ve since gotten every job I’ve ever applied for and still get calls from headhunters because EXPERIENCE is what the better facilities are after.</p>
<p>I feel for the new grads.</p>
<p>And yeah, pay is not great. </p>
<p>Yesterday DH and I went to a law firm to do some estate planning and re-do our wills. The senior partner handed us off to one of the junior guys, saying "you don’t want me for this. My cost is $710 per hour, while he is great at estate planning and will only cost you $470/hr. </p>
<p>Clearly I went into the wrong profession! Actually, no, but thanks to DH, because his compensation makes the salary part of the equation not sting so badly.</p>
<p>Most of the attys I’ve ever worked with top out the hourly rate at $200 an hour and often much less after all the U billable time. I’ve heard from MDs that nurses in our state can make >$100K/year, including overtime and LOTS of stress. </p>
<p>I know attys who have had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and start out at $40K/yr and up. </p>
<p>A few friends and a niece are nurses.
One friend is a geriatric nurse after retiring from a career as an English prof. He loves it.
The others work in clinics or in home care, not hospitals. My niece started in the clinic as an LPN, they helped her get her RN, now I think she is working on her NP credential.</p>
<p>go to a hospital and observe the nursing staff. the dynamics at play are interesting and troubling. it has nothing to do with pay or work load. </p>
<p>There is a hierarchy in hospitals that would remind you of the middle ages. The venerated physicians, and then it all rolls downhill from there. In fact many of the er’s in my area only keep one MD on staff per shift. PA’s and RN’s come next. I have met enough docs in hospitals to know I couldn’t work with them without losing my mind or my self esteem. The dr strolls in, gives orders, then the nurses carry it out. And many times the nurses may actually know what to do better than the doc because they are the ones caring for the patient. </p>
<p>It is VERY hard to get directly admitted into a nursing program in colleges now. You essentially must have a 4.0 I think many people get into the pre-nursing program and then don’t qualify to get in.</p>
<p>However if someone does want to work in the medical field there are many different avenues - tech’s, rn’s, pa’s, etc</p>
<p>That info was several years old, but most other sources I found had Texas nurses still averaging in the $60,000s. Of course, the COL in Texas is far less than COL in Hawaii.</p>
<p>I posted on another thread that D2 was hired for a summer internship in the oil and gas industry for more than I make per hour, PLUS $800/month housing allowance, PLUS travel expenses, PLUS gas allowance. </p>
<p>Relative to many other professions, nursing pay is not that great. The junior attorney billing $470 obviously shares that with the firm (have no idea how much), and he has an advanced degree, which I have not pursued.</p>
<p>DH has a Bachelor’s in Finance and his compensation is many many many multiples times mine. However, he is 100% commission. He doesn’t produce, he makes nothing no matter how hard he works.</p>
<p>That has absolutely not been true in my experience. Having too many patients to the point that the nurse feels she is unable to give the quality of care she desires, worrying she may make a mistake, and feeling constantly overwhelmed and stressed was/is a major issue. The nurses I’ve known have no problem working hard, but feeling that you are stretched over too many patients is another thing entirely, particularly if the acuity level of those patients is high.</p>
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<p>From what I’ve heard, this is one of the reasons for the proliferation of for- profit nursing schools which are very expensive and are helping to create the glut of new grads in certain markets. One of my coworkers came from such a school, and when she told me what her student debt was, I couldn’t believe my ears (I went to a local state university).</p>
<p>Those billing rates and pay rates for lawyers make it look like law is an elite or bust type of profession (since we know that many law school graduates cannot find law jobs).</p>
<p>Back to nursing, perhaps those students trying to enter the oversubscribed nursing programs do not realize what they are getting into in terms of what the job is like (i.e. not noticing that there is enough dissatisfaction for nurses to form unions and strike).</p>
<p>In a closed profession (where performing the duties of the job is limited to those with specific paper qualifications) pay is high when there is shortage of people, and drops when there is a surplus of people. Lawyers used to make a lot, now there are too many so incomes have dropped. Physicians have been most adept at keeping their numbers low, so their incomes are still high. It doesn’t have much to to with the complexity of the job itself.</p>
<p>My daughter is a nurse. She works at a local hospital in the Emergency dept. She was extremely fortunate to be hired while she only had her 2 year nursing degree (and she’d passed her NCLEX, so she was an RN) completed and was working on her BSN. Her goal was to work in the ED so this job offer was terrific for her. She loves being a nurse and she loves her boss. In general, the ED docs respect the nurses and there is a good working relationship between them. </p>
<p>I will note that many of her fellow students had trouble finding jobs (how are they supposed to get experience?!) and were extremely envious of her job offer. </p>
<p>However, there are some serious negatives. At her hosp, the nurses work four 12 hour shifts. This puts them below the required 40 hours which makes an employee full-time. Not good/not fair!<br>
The worst are the Press-Ganey reports. These are patient satisfaction reports and the nurses take the brunt of the dissatisfaction - even though the patient may have been unhappy with nursing assistant or some other person. And which patients will tend to be the most unhappy? The rude, drug-seeking patients who shouldn’t be in an ER in the first place. If you deny these people the drugs they want, then they write bad press-ganey reports but if you give in and give them the drugs, then you are turning your hosp into a drug candy store and all the area addicts will be at your door for FREE drugs. For reasons unknown to the staff, the hosp admin staff doesn’t seem to understand this. And this problem is nationwide. It isn’t just a problem in our little area. </p>
<p>And stress - how about the shift where she had 7 patients to care for, including 3 who were ICU patients. On the ICU floor, one nurse is assigned to one ICU patient. 1:1 ratio. But in the ER, my daughter had 3 such patients in addition to her other ED patients. How’s that for stress. I asked her how her shift was and her comment to me was, “All I can say is thankfully no patients died during my shift.” </p>
<p>My college roommate (and good friend) was a nursing major. She worked as an operating room nurse with very famous cardiac surgeons in Houston. She could not stand it. The doctors were just as you describe and didn’t follow hospital rules. So at the age of 30, my brave friend, who suffers from dyslexia, went back to med school at UT-San Antonio. I was so proud of her! She actually failed her first year because of all the memorization, but was allowed to repeat in order to pass. She worked for awhile as an OB/gyn on a reservation in Oklahoma. Now she and her husband work for a Christian missionary organization.</p>
<p>I don’t know where your friend was a hair stylist, but here it is a poorly paid position unless you have enough of your own client base to sustain you. ( it’s most common to rent your chair in a salon, paying your own medical and taxes as well as rent to the owner) You are on your feet all day, but you don’t have the option of wearing comfortable nurse shoes in most salons.</p>
<p>I also don’t understand the implication that nurses form unions because they are unhappy with their career choice.
I know that aeronautical engineers form unions, and principals, as well as teachers. Firefighters and police officers join unions as well as players in the NFL. Pilots as well as dock workers.A union is simply a group of workers who come together to make decisions about the conditions of their work.</p>
<p>Would employees form unions if they were completely satisfied with their pay, benefits, and working conditions at their employers, or the labor market were sufficiently competitive that dissatisfied employees can find better employers? Especially, would they strike or threaten to strike if satisfied?</p>
<p>Not sure I follow. Four 12 hour shifts puts them into overtime. The standard in my state when I worked ICU at my hospital (and still is at that hospital) was that three 12 hour shifts a week was considered full time and full benefits applied. I wonder if that is no longer the standard throughout the state or that it just differs in other states. Also, unless one had a “fresh heart” (a patient straight out of the OR from coronary bypass surgery), ICU ratios were 2:1. Of course individual situations could affect that if a patient was particularly sick, but in general that was the case. No nurse could ever take more than 2 patients in ICU. I’ve heard that this is changing as a standard, which is not a good thing, imo.</p>
<p>Are the 12 hr shifts still considered Baylor shifts? Aren’t they time and a half? And unless my math is off, wouldn’t 4 12 hr shifts be more than fulltime?</p>