Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Despite improvements, nurse shortage still predicted, numbers show

Article

Why are we short on nurses ? Why have I been living in this country for my whole life, more than thirty years (a lot more , I don't want to give away my age) and I've been hearing about the nursing shortage the whole time ?

Because Nurses Cost Money !

It's a simple equation. Nurses do not bring money into a hospitle. They cost it money. There were these nurses aides that used to help nurses with their chores, but they got cut too. Why ? They cost money.

What brings money into a hospital ?
Not much. The government doles out a flat some and tells them "don't spend it all in one place !" and thats pretty much it.

Doctors are worse.
You wanna know why there are only 250 new doctors per year permitted to join the medical ranks in ontario , and why thats not gonna change ? I'll give you a hint. It's not because of their 100 000 $/year salary.

It's because doctors put people in hospitals. And that costs money. Lots of money. When you have to wait six hours to see a doctor , you give up and go home , or don't go at all , a lot of the time. If the wait time were to be cut to three hours say ... guess what ? Twice as many people would wind up in the hospital ! And we don't have that much bed space ! Heck , we don't have the bed space for the doctors we do have !

And of course Doctors write perscriptions.
And if you just got sick , you're probably suddenly out of work , and that means the government's paying for your perscription.

And you thought doctors were costing you money before the perscription game ?

The doctor shortage / nurse shortage , etc , isn't really a staff shortage. It's a money shortage. Big time money, not just the salary of a few extra workers, we're talking building new hospitals and paying vast amounts in perscription drugs. The actual salary of these people is microscopic compared to that.

Free medical has it's drawbacks , it seems.
It's much better than what we had before (that would be the "no money , no doctor" system) but it isn't problem free.

Best you can do is set up a team to look for cost savings I guess. Maybe manufacture your own generic drugs that are commonly used that the copyrights have run out on, things like that.

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