Sure, but the terminal point of that logic is _an exodus of healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic_. Seems like something to avoid?
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Pay them more money. Simple.
How much money do I have to pay you to get a nursing degree, quit your current job, and start helping out the pandemic?
Serious question. Now that you have an idea of how much money that actually costs, do you understand why things don't scale the way you think they do?
Even then, it will take you years to get the skills needed to be a nurse (and in ~1 year, thanks to the vaccine, the surge in nurses won't be needed anymore). What needed to happen is that you needed to start training to be a nurse 2 years ago, if we wanted you helping a hospital today. And that's assuming you're inclined to learn biological sciences and actually pass nursing school on your first try.
Nursing is not that complex. The bulk of the work can be offloaded on semi-skilled labor with on the job training. This is what the army does, it works fine. This is not rocket science here.
nursing is “not that complex” in the same sense that programming is “typing characters into a file”.
my sister is doing critical care work as a nurse in a covid crisis zone earning less than 60K a year. this is with a decade of experience in some of the top hospitals in the country. i think HN has a very California/New York view of nurse’s compensation and status.
her previous hospital responded to covid by firing a lot of nursing staff (grandma’s couldn’t get knee replacements, but covid wasn’t super bad here yet so hospitals just shed resources only to need them again in two months).
hospital administrations responded to the crisis by cutting staff, cutting pay, and increasing their own salaries, while taking months to procure PPE for their workers. at the height of the iraq war, it was a big news story that soldiers had not been receiving adequate protection and that some of the vehicle and personnel armor they had received was defective. if we want to make a war analogy, this is blackwater contractors getting paid millions to play at war games geared to the tits and barely ever leaving the green zone while the soldiers doing the real grunt work are getting shredded by mandatory redeployments with no leave and issued substandard gear.
on top of that, covid has been functionally live clinical experimentation at mass scale. a lot of medicine has been made rote, so i think jaded people think it is just a big book of instructions. this pandemic was figuring things out live at runtime.
the compassionate response to a massive crisis in healthcare worker morale brought on by burnout due to extremely fast paced, high risk, high stress, highly specified work conditions during a global pandemic is something like “i hope this can be managed so that care can continue to be delivered” and not “they should get a new job”.
You edited your post, so I'll reply separately to the added content here.
The difference between the military and the healthcare system is that soldiers can't quit, but healthcare workers can.
Every single healthcare worker in America is working at that job because they prefer that job to all other alternative jobs available to them. This is trivially true because if they preferred another job they could quit and take that job.
Of course, we all have stress, and nobody likes their job, and everyone gripes and complains, and everyone's bosses are slave drivers, and everyone's customers are demanding. That's why it's a job and not a hobby.
I stand by my argument that most of the work of monitoring and caring for covid patients can be performed adequately by semi-skilled workers.
That's a terrible analogy because thousands of newly minted programmers come out of abbreviated code bootcamp type programs all the time, and go right to work.
Anyway, the army actually does this. Even the special forces 18D medic training (the most elite and rigorous medical training they provide) is only a year long, and they can do everything a nurse can do plus, for example, perform surgery on goats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_Unite...
Yes. It is easy to solve problems with a budget of $700,000,000,000 a year.
With enough money, you can develop training programs to make total dumbasses perform skilled work. But unless you plan on spending $7 trillion over the next 10 years on improving the healthcare system of this country, I don't think your comparisons to the military are very apt.
I think US healthcare spending dwarfs the defense budget by an order of magnitude. Not sure what point you're trying to make there.
The US military is a system that converts high school students (of varying capabilities) into soldiers and officers.
1. You start with propaganda: movies and video games that show the military in a positive light, encouraging a number of impressionable kids to join the military. I'm not against propaganda btw, but I understand how it works: the modern military spends a lot of money on Call of Duty esports for example, Twitch.tv recruitment, etc. etc. The goal is to make a positive first impression, usually through an entertainment venue (sports, video games, or movies)
2. You continue with explicit ROTC programs: where the high schoolers (or college-kids) can get their first real taste of military culture.
3. At actual recruitment: there are standardized tests that sort students off of their capabilities: finding a job that matches their skillsets.
4. You have a training program ("Boot Camp") that gives these recruits the skills they need to start their job.
5. You have a clear and well-understood ladder, organized by rank and pay-grade. Though its somewhat complex to outsiders, those within the military fully understand what they need to do to grow as a soldier (or officer). There's no ambiguity for what's needed to grow from E1 to E2 or from Lieutenant to Major. There's a literal army of bean-counters who are also double-checking and triple-checking the results to make sure things are going as planned across divisions.
6. Post-military life is also considered: the GI Bill ensures that college-life is guaranteed for soldiers, to be ready to be retrained after their military career. As such, military life can be temporary (4 years or 8 year stints), or permanent (a full 30+ year career). Both lives are encouraged and well supported by the structure. A number of Federal jobs (and state-jobs) even provide explicit bonuses to veterans, to help the soldier transition into post-military life.
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That's how you recruit, and train soldiers in the military. If your point is that the military has an awesome ability to recruit and train personnel, I fully agree with you.
But don't diminish the amount of thought, and resources, that have been poured into the military structure. From pre-recruitment propaganda, to recruitment programs, to continuing education (and the entire promotion structure), the military requires a LOT of money and manpower to support.
If you want to deploy such a "bootcamp" for nurses and doctors, I think I'm in agreement with you. I just want to be clear that such a "Bootcamp" will be extremely expensive, no matter how I look at it. Even if you cut out propaganda, and a bunch of excess spending stuff (military bands and other "morale builders"), the core of the military recruitment / training / post-training structure is very expensive.
The army needs propaganda to recruit people because it's not just a job. Soldiers don't have the right to quit if they don't like the working conditions. But many people actually sign up (or re-up) for the money, to pay off student loans, etc.
If more workers are needed to care for covid patients then the wages will rise, and more workers will switch from other jobs to perform this work. Training people to empty bedpans, draw blood, monitor diagnostic equipment, and so on is not any more complex than what people learn in a code bootcamp, and code bootcamps are doing fine.
Nursing isn't some kind of uniquely difficult occupation. If a pilot can learn to fly helicopters commercially in a year then I would propose that we can train people to do this, too.
< Though its somewhat complex to outsiders, those within the military fully understand what they need to do to grow as a soldier (or officer). There's no ambiguity for what's needed to grow from E1 to E2 or from Lieutenant to Major.
You mean like in Team America? /jk
No seriously, how does it work?