Poke The Bear!

The state of many nursing homes is now almost desperate.  There’s a number of reasons for this, but one of the main culprits is the shortage of competent (or any) available healthcare workers. 

Why is this?

     I’ve been in the healthcare management industry seemingly forever.  I started my career when I was in my twenties and I continue to work now in my seventies.  I’ve kind of seen it all (I say this cautiously).  In all that time, almost all of the facilities I’ve worked at have experienced staffing shortages from time to time whether actual or perceived.  What I’m seeing now, however, is quite different.  There has always been a relationship between nursing home staffing and the state of the American economy.  When the economy is slow, there are plenty of available workers.  When the economy heats up, there are too few healthcare workers.  Why?

     Well consider this- what would you rather do?  Work Monday through Friday on days, and make good money in a factory or warehouse, or work odd hours, weekends, and non-day shift hours and make less money.  And you do this while cleaning, bathing, feeding, and dressing people who are often trying to grab you, pinch you, spit at you, kick you, slap you, and yell at you.  Hmm; tough decision!

     Now add to all of this the advent of the COVID Pandemic.  The job was tough enough, but now you could actually die! And many of these heroes have died.  We need to take our hats off to these dedicated healthcare workers who have hung in there. 

God knows we need them!  But there’s just not enough of them and it’s getting worse.

     So what do we do?  Well I’ve got an idea. For some people, it will be politically sensitive, but I really don’t care.  We have at our southern border, tens of thousands of desperate people risking their lives for a chance to enter this country.  They’ve come here in hopes of a better and safer life (JUST LIKE YOUR FAMILY DID!). All right, most of them don’t have skills or speak our language.  Well I say let us screen as many of these people as possible to see who would be both suited and interested in healthcare work.  Let us teach them English and educate them on our culture and values.  Let us teach them the necessary skills to be successful for a career in our healthcare industry and find them desperately needed job opportunities.  

     We have a valuable human resource at our door step.  It’s time for this country to ignore the hate mongers among us at ALL levels.  Some people will see this as Liberal garbage.  It’s not Liberal anything.  It’s moral and ethical, and maybe just as important, it’s good business.