RN here. I’ve been around. I’ve worked for hospitals and I’m currently a travel RN. I’ve figured out most of “the game” at this point, so I’ll give you the dirty truth as briefly as possible which isn’t really possible.

I will start by saying that $8k/week wasn’t enough money to pay me to work some assignments I was offered during COVID. Hard to believe but the emotional toll was extremely heavy and money doesn’t stop you from thinking about how your patients are suffering and dying because there are too many of them. Aside from that you couldn’t pay me enough to scab.

Hospitals administrators are (by and large) evil corporate overlords like any other industry. Many are not medical professionals they are MBAs etc. They may have been CFO at a toothpaste company or shower curtain ring factory before their job at the hospital. (Yes, obvious nod to Del Griffith there).

1. They run hospitals like any business: Maximize profit, cut as many costs as possible. They are paid a performance bonus so the more revenue they bring in and the more they save the higher their bonus. Employees are expensive for every company so that’s an easy place to cut costs. Similar to the car company recall “formula” mentioned in Fight Club they spread us as thin as possible to the point where there are minimal complaints, minimal patient ‘near misses’ and ‘sentinel events’ (preventable patient deaths), but the working conditions are tolerable enough that they don’t have an extremely high employee turnover.
   

The other place they save is on supplies. I’m not just talking about the Kleenex that’s so thin it’s considered a torture device by the UN. They don’t want us to use and more new IV tubing sets than necessary, etc.

The bar has been set so low that they ALL mostly suck to work for. Hate the customer service your cell phone provider has? Go ahead and switch, it will be just as crappy with every other carrier. Same thing.

1. The patients are treated like gold at face value but it’s a facade. Patients could be given SO much better care but due to spreading employees so thin (and the care being similarly lousy most everywhere) people don’t realize. The manager that comes around to listen to their concerns isn’t going to be able to do much of anything to help without screwing another patient over because there aren’t enough employees.
   

“You’ve been waiting too long to get your CT scan? We are so sorry! It’s a challenging time in healthcare let me see what I can do.” That means calling CT scan and bumping someone else down the list just because someone wants to get in faster. I’ve seen them change an order from ‘routine’ to ‘stat’ (immediately) to satisfy an unhappy patient. That means the the truly stat patients who may have a head bleed etc are going to have to wait because Grandma has been waiting two days to get her scan and is upset. This is absolutely, horribly wrong.

1. During the pandemic nurses wore the same masks for a whole shift or a week that are meant to be used one time. When COVID started I watched every nurse, tech, etc on our unit get sick with COVID. Every single one. The administration was working from home. To save money they stopped contributing to 401k and PTO. Froze vacations. Mandated staff to work extra days. One kick in the balls after another every day, all day. They refused to give raises, they refused to hire enough staff, it was absolutely awful. Nurses started leaving the bedside in droves. Instead of bumping the staff nurse hourly pay by $5/hr to retain them they now had to pay travel nurses 4-5 times that to replace them. And because they were so much more expensive they hired less than the number of nurses quitting.

For the last two years nurses have asked for a couple things to retain them: more money and better nurse:patient ratios, which means hiring more nurses. Because those cost money (and are what the nurses want) they have done everything except that. They gave us pens, mini candy bars, donuts, pizza, put signs up that said “heroes work here!”

When those didn’t work they had the audacity to ask us for suggestions. “What can we do to retain nurses other than pay more?” Fucking nothing! Nurses left in droves to take travel contracts to make better money and have more control of their working conditions. In response hospitals started threatening that if they quit to take a travel job they would be blacklisted from re-hire. When that didn’t work they dangled a carrot and said “hang in there we’re working out some raises for you!” They strung them along for months to not quit, only to reveal between $1-3/hour raises! They lied to try and save as much money as possible by not having to hire as many travel nurses. One fucking kick in the balls after another. Now that some hospitals are actually offering decent raises and pay packages it’s almost too late. The hospitals have dug their own grave so deep it’s almost impossible for them to get out now.

There’s a lot more and I could go on for hours about this. But there’s a serious fucking healthcare issue right now. It’s teetering on collapse. We have seen a few hospital systems close hospitals that incurred losses. Many more will follow. Flu season is going to be absolutely destructive to healthcare if they do not hire nurses.

Despite what the hospital system is saying this strike is 10000% necessary. Not only do those nurses want better pay to reflect the insanely terrible conditions we must now work in, they want better ratios which means the hospital will have to hire more nurses. This is much safer for the patients! There is a lot of research done on how injury and death rates increase when a nurse has even one extra patient in their assignment. Many of us have between two and five EXTRA patients.

Please. Stay safe. Take care of yourself. Drive carefully. Do not end up in a hospital.