Yeah, the system won't get fixed until it is broken. As far as hospital administration cares to understand, the hospital is still running, there's still money coming in the door. If nurses are really worried about losing their licenses from the corner cutting they need to do, then they absolutely should quit and let all the patient deaths that ensue be entirely the fault of admin.
That makes sense logically in our heads that such a course of action might save lives in the long run, a triage of sorts. But the nurses know the patients that would die if they quit, and they know the other nurses they would be heaping the work on, including watching those patients die. Nurses are taught triage, but when that takes the form of walking away from patients you could save to save more you have never met, I think that goes against what draws many to the profession in the first place.
> they absolutely should quit and let all the patient deaths that ensue be entirely the fault of admin.
Letting people die as a negotiation tactic with your bosses is horribly unethical. You can handwave and say it's the admin's fault, but that won't change the reality of those people being dead because of the way you chose to address a dispute with other people.
Putting nurses in situations where they feel like quitting a crappy job means people will die is even more unethical. Don't blame the nurse who's put in the trolley problem, blame the guy who's tied a bunch of people to the trolley tracks.
Take it to the extreme: if you were enslaved, forced to care for critically ill people, would you be acting wrongly to run away if you could? I don't think so. The difference is a matter of degree, not of kind.
More practically, not every nurse's threshold is in the same place; each nurse decides they've had enough at a different point. It's not as though — barring coordinated effort — every nurse is going to quit the same day. The problem will manifest itself as declining staffing, not a sudden depopulation of the hospital, and it will not go unaddressed.
People could die because nurses have to cut corners to keep up. It's better to not be involved in unethical behavior than to contribute to it continuing to limp along.
And to be clear, I don't think of this as a "negotiation tactic with the bosses". I see this as a tactic to get the bosses evicted completely.
That's a much easier thing to say as the person who's not the one who has to actually do it. Actively choosing to do identifiable harm now to prevent future diffuse harm is a more difficult version of the 'Trolley Problem' that already gives people trouble when the numbers are direct.
No, it's actively choosing to not do identifiable harm. Whatever harm comes to patients when you are not there, not even an employee anymore, can in no way be blamed on you.
Why does nursing licensing exist? Probably in no small part to ensure a minimum standard of care. Therefore staying and cutting corners in violation of your licensing terms is the active choice to do identifiable harm. To stay and cut corners is allowing management to shift the blame on you.
I've been on the difficult side of this problem, where safety and people's lives are at stake. Management never says "cut corners". It's always "you're expected to get through the work load." If you ask them if you're supposed to cut corners to make it happen, you get greeted with silence. They will stonewall you on every corner. You can tell them it's impossible and they will just ignore you and repeat their "expectations".
They'll hang your job over your head. They'll tell you they will just get someone else to do it. They'll tell you they'll blackball you. It's a bluff. Any place that is cutting corners is already in dire straights. They can't fire you because they'd be in an even worse position. They can't find anyone else to do the job because they wouldn't be in this situation if they paid enough to hire enough people to do the job. They can't blackball you if they themselves become persona non grata because they were at the helm when a hospital had to shut down because they refused to pay enough for nurses.
The only play, as a bottom rung worker, is to not play at all. It's War Games and WOPR.
Quit and the situation gets resolved very quickly. The org is on its last legs. It's only life support is the people who bend over backwards to keep it running. One hospital guess down, it's nightly news. Two and it's a national emergency.
GP said quitting, which is obviously not unethical (given some notice and not quitting at a time designed to cause maximum injury), even if people do die as a consequence.
Depends on how you quit. If a nurse or doctor gives appropriate notice before quitting or striking, so that innocent patients can be rerouted first, then there's no problem. But if they're walking out of an ER room and abandoning a patient on the table with their rib cage splayed open, that's basically murder.
In this case, the nurse who "called 911" was faced with a situation where the waiting room was packed with people who needed emergency care. For her to walk away from her job in that moment would be like leaving somebody on the ER table. At the very least, a nurse in that situation should persist through their shift and quit afterwards, not quit on the spot.
Another hospital, or to scab nurses the administration has to scramble to call in. But to walk out without notice in the middle of a crisis because you want a stack of dead bodies to blame on your boss is basically murder.
> You can handwave and say it's the admin's fault, but that won't change the reality of those people being dead because of the way you chose to address a dispute with other people.
You mean, the way the admin chose to address this dispute. The admin is the one cost-cutting.
Then quit when you're not on duty. Not when you're on duty and the situation is perilous. The first is eminently reasonable, but the second is tantamount to murder.
Easily said. Doing so puts your colleagues in much more stress, and in a time where there's more demand than supply for a profession it means people will suffer. And its a profession by people who try to lessen or end suffering, like many service jobs including teacher, police, etc. These professions will always lose because corporate psychopaths know their calling is to not leave society hanging.
And that thinking is exploited by the sociopaths who don't give a flying fuck who is suffering and dying because they insist on extracting a profit from every facet of society.
I'm kind of sick of looking at problems like this and having people like you saying that the only solution is to continue to let sociopaths ruin everything for the rest of us.