Nursing Homes Keep Losing Workers

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

HEALTH

Nursing Homes Keep Losing Workers

Employment has continued to fall as job losses in other sectors reverse; low wages, burnout and fear of Covid-19 keep staff away

By Lauren Weber | Photographs by Chona Kasinger for The Wall Street Journal

https://twitter.com/laurenweberwsj
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Aug. 25, 2021 9:30 am ET

Nursing homes have a long-term care problem: 18 months after the Covid-19 crisis began, their staffs are still shrinking.

While employment in nearly every occupation has been recovering from the shock of the pandemic, the number of people working in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities has continued to drop, according to federal data. (1)

Nursing homes and residential-care facilities employed three million people in July, down 380,000 workers from February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industry employment has fallen every month except one since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. By contrast, job losses in the leisure and hospitality industry, another hard-hit sector, began reversing in May last year, and the industry has recovered almost 80% of the jobs that were lost in the first months of the pandemic.

“I’ve been in the industry for 40 years and I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Terry Robertson, chief executive of Josephine Caring Community, a long-term-care facility in Stanwood, Wash.

Turnover has been twice as high as it was before the pandemic, he said. “We turned down 138 admissions from hospitals last month because we didn’t have the staff to open another unit,” he said.

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(1) https://www.wsj.com/articles/july-jobs-report-unemployment-rate-2021-11628196413

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nursing-homes-keep-losing-workers-11629898200

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Long after most industries started adding back staff, workforces at nursing homes are still shrinking. “I’ve never seen it this bad.”

Link to tweet

[mopinko]

1. imho, we are a traumatized nation.

compassion fatigue is gonna be a thing we are dealing with for the next decade.
the national supply of fucks is in deep negative territory.

[Midnight Writer]

2. Nursing homes have become corporate franchises following a low wage, high profit model.

Crap wages and benefits, deplorable working conditions, chronic understaffing.

Warehouses for the old and sick.

We need, as a nation, to honor the people who care for our sick. And by honor, I don't mean giving them medals. I mean giving them pay, benefits, and the training and resources to care for their patients.

[Earthrise]

5. Yes. Exactly, and...

The majority of people who work at nursing homes are nurse assistants, or they cook, clean, do laundry, drive residents to appointments, etc. All the jobs I've listed above are typically low-wage (well under $15) and have low or no training requirements.

I was a nurse's assistant in college. I found sitting through the training painful because it was so rudimentary. It's important to promptly put soiled clothing and linens in the laundry because they have germs on them. Touch the bottom of a plate or bowl to see how hot food is before spooning it into someone's mouth. I developed an appropriate fear of how quickly a small red blotch on someone's hip or buttocks can turn into a big, open bedsore in training, and that was useful, but otherwise nada.

Important: I'm not saying that excellent nurse assistants lack impressive skills; I'm saying that if they have them, it's because they learned them on the job - they listened, asked questions, and learned by reading or by trial-and-error, etcetera.

These jobs are filled by women far more often than men, and that's part of why they are not respected and not paid well. Women sometimes take them because they're told that the schedules are flexible, but they wind up quitting when they realize they will never get a consistent schedule that supports work/life balance.

The jobs can be back-breaking - lifting patients, heavy laundry, furniture, carrying groceries, pushing wheelchairs, etc.

The amount of work they're expected to do in one shift is insane. If people arrive eager to do a good job, the impossibility of doing everything that they want to and should do for residents will quickly push them into learned helplessness and learned hopelessness.

Offer $20 an hour, treat employees well, and fix the problems with the scheduling (is two days off in a row each week too much to ask?) - and nursing homes will have plenty of employees.

[appalachiablue]

13. Thanks for explaining the disturbing reality

of US nursing homes and the circumstances of hard working aides and nurse assistants. It doesn't have to be this way.

K/R

[Normal Citizen 1]

19. Kindness & a good hourly

Kindness towards caregivers goes a very long way. $20/hour is meager, because of the taxation. Caregivers, CNA's and LVN's should make $25/hour, base pay.

[hibbing]

3. Wait until all the boomers are heading there

My mother was paying 5K a month for her assisted living and she didn't even need much care. As usual, we do not have the political will to do anything about this.

You live, work, save during your lifetime and if you don't have long term care insurance, your assets get depleted until you are broke and Medicare starts paying. I am finding out that is the reason people have long term care insurance to begin with.

Peace

[SWBTATTReg]

4. There's an easy solution, increase wages, as one restaurant owner told others when they...

were (other restaurant owners who were complaining about not getting enough workers to apply to work at their establishments). Why is it the fault of workers, the fault of government, the fault of ABC endless number of other reasons when there's a simple solution already at hand, increase worker pay.

The republicans had slammed the doors shut on increasing min. pay rates for decades and now COVID has turned the tables on them and their continued efforts to keep pay down to a bare bones minimum, being COVID has shown workers that better pay is possible, that entire industries have been upended and the 'old ways of doing business' are gone into the dust bins of history.

The republicans are still fighting worker resistance by ended federal support for jobless pay benefits in their states where workers have been laid off...I suspect this effort will actually backlash against republicans as what is to stop workers from moving to other states that still offer decent benefits (and probably better pay/benefits too).

[cstanleytech]

6. Solution is simple. Increase wages to about what a nurse would get and hire enough people to do the

job properly rather than continuing the currently popular method of running with a deliberately understaffed plus low wage workforce.

[Mosby]

7. Woman in this article blames unemployment insurance for her worker shortage

Apparently she doesn't think her pay of one dollar over minimum has anything to do with it.

https://www.kold.com/2021/04/08/business-struggles-stay-staffed-i-am-losing-employees-state-arizona-because-they-are-offering-something-that-i-cannot/

[Ziggysmom]

8. I did nursing assistant work when I was a nursing student years ago. It is back breaking,

emotionally draining work. In addition to the low pay and physical demands, some patients are downright nasty. The nice ones you get quite attached to, and you suffer greatly when they pass. I pray my husband and I never end up in a long term care facility.

[Deminpenn]

9. Not sure most people understand these jobs are hard, physical work

Moving people in/out of bed or wheelchairs or into the shower/bath, helping residents dress and eat. That takes a toll on backs, shoulders, elbows and knees. The pay is ridiculously low, too.

[Jetheels]

10. For profit healthcare is a failure.

And an oxymoron.
Your fucked if you wind up in a nursing home. End.

[roamer65]

11. Quite often the residents are abusive as well.

Verbally and physically.

Home health aides face nearly the same fate as nursing home workers.

Just a different venue.

[love_katz]

12. Kicking for visibility.

This issue needs to be shouted from the roof tops. Even people who earn the pay of doctors and lawyers have trouble affording the cost of long-term care. For profit care systems charge gargantuan fees and provide abysmal levels of care. The understaffed workers end up overwhelmed and the residents suffer. The care givers are so badly underpaid that they end up working two or three jobs with negative impacts on their patients and their own families.

[Kid Berwyn]

14. Like hospitals, hotels, retailers and restaurants.

No one wants to work with the public for some reason.

[RobinA]

16. The Public

Was awful on the first day of my first job at McDonalds back in 70-something. They’ve only gotten worse. You’ve got to make yourself immune to the abuse or you can’t do it.

[ForgoTheConsequence]

17. After decades in the service industry I can attest to this.

Years of being called homophobic and anti-semitic slurs. It became too much.

[Politicub]

15. CNAs have a hard job and are extremely underpaid and unappreciated.

It's physically and emotionally demanding work, and Covid makes everything worse.

[Normal Citizen 1]

18. Be kind to the Caregivers

These are the professionals who keep these facilities going: caregivers, c.n.a.'s and l.v.n.'s. In order to make these facilities profitable, they are underpaid. And if they are not underpaid, they are overworked. What i mean by overworked is; they take care of multiple clients. I've been in this line of work as a sort of "bridge" towards a major career change. It is backbreaking work, and nonstop, from the crack of dawn, to bedtime. Clients are dressed, transported, fed, bathed, and assisted in their toileting needs. Because the medical profession operates on a sort of caste system, these workers are underappreciated and at times looked down upon, even by other caregivers, l.v.n.'s, and c.n.a.'s. This is a line of work that very few Americans would ever take, so it is often filled by people from Asia, South America, and Africa. Be kind to them, as you would want them to be kind and compassionate towards your loved ones who are in long-term care.

[gopiscrap]

20. welcome to du