Around 5,000 workers walked off the job at Providence hospitals Friday, demanding better pay and working conditions.
Finally some good news
Having a direct line to the providence management team, I’d like to say that a significant number of these people are absolutely incompetent workers, refuse to do the basic things outlined in their job descriptions—like patient charting—frequently endanger the lives of patients, and could be blamed for hundreds of patient deaths because they were too busy in the break room to do proper rounding. Most of their problems stem for poor training, refusing new training, and horrible time management skills.
And these are the best that can be found at the salaries being offered. If they go away you will get even worse people.
My experience with healthcare workers is that they are underpaid and overworked and that after years and years of that they just stop caring.
Most of them make over 150k, so I’m not sure what salaries you’re talking about.
Sure sometimes overworked, but like I said—time management.
5 patients per nurse is hardly understaffed, again time management and prioritization of tasks.
You think MOST hospital staff make OVER 150k in the Portland area? That is an incredibly hot take.
The average salary is about 95k but that also includes the “high” earners and I put high in quotations because it still isn’t like tech sector. A medical assistant at providence starts at 48k/yr. Desk worker starts at about 30k/yr.
That means the average worker can afford $650 to $2000 a month in rent or mortgage. Even at the top end that isnt enough to get a 2 bedroom apartment if they are single with a kid. That isnt enough to even approach buying a house unless they are splitting it with someone else making more than them.
I’m just talking about nurses. I’m all for raising the minimum wage.
And yes, shit is expensive. Lower the price of shit or they’ll just raise it once everyone gets paid more. I’m all for rent and home price caps. Housing can no longer be treated as an “investment” with our population size and housing availability.
But calling for hospitals to admit fewer people, and then asking for more money and a lower ratio makes absolutely no sense. They need patients to make money to pay employees.
Should they just stop accepting Medicare patients? That pays like crap.
For an RN the average is $100k and the top top is ~$160k.
The answer is that the overall healthcare system needs to be rebuilt. The fact though is that the hospitals all know the incoming administration will be cool with corner cutting but also won’t pay out very well.
The trend already is for insurance to never pay out. Currently you have to bill for 4X the price of something just so the insurance company can write off how big of a savings things are when they pay out only 1/4th the cost which ends up hopefully being the actual cost.
So you have a hospital administration attempting to extract value from their workers, because they know that no one else will pay. Besides if a strike goes on they can just get the new administration to handwave hiring “holistic nursing” professionals who take a fake online test. They can just read out that the AI says that the problem is a combination of verbal irregularity and overall health being a bit behind.
They don’t hire “holistic” nurses, they have to be qualified on paper. Although, you wouldn’t know for as much as they refuse to get vaccinated and wear masks.
Many hospitals are going to start doing more remote nurses for intake and assessments, since people can’t seem to handle doing that themselves (peacehealth is piloting some programs now). The bad habits of the few are going to punish the many.
But yes I agree 1000% the healthcare system is broken as hell. And nothing will change until the people at the very top think, “if I put profit over people, my life might end.” That’s not even the administration level. It’s those conveniently hidden people who never get blamed.
You sound like you’re just management.
You sound like you’ve never worked at a hospital, and don’t understand healthcare.
