this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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I don't think anyone is worried about there being too many old people for young people to look after. I believe you're confusing that for the very serious issue, being that there won't be enough young people financially supporting social services to adequately fund them to meet the needs of the aging population. In that sense, AI automating jobs directly exacerbates the problem, because less young people working means less taxes funding things like social security and Medicare in the US.
Lol spoken from someone who has never worked in nursing homes. It's not a population issue it's a horrible job cleaning shit off old people ass. There is never enough people willing to fill that role. Source: worked as a CNA after highschool for 5 years. Used to get mandated double shifts every week because the following shift to whichever shift I would be working would be short staffed.
Of course there are enough people to fill that role-- there aren't enough people willing to fill that role for the shit pay. Increase the pay, eventually you'll hit the point where the jobs are filled
Spoken so surely from another person who has never done the fucking job๐คฃ
It doesn't matter. There is always a price point that will attract enough workers.
It's just a price point that's higher than private elder care facilities want to pay. It's not a labour shortage, it's a wage shortage.
If your guna just argue to be a cunt then atleast know what you are talking about.
Before I go into detail explaining how it actually works, I have to know, how much?
How much to wash old liver spotted asses covered in shit and piss every time you do rounds which is 3 times per shift for as many as 15 residents per round; then between rounds clean more shit off the lucid residents that didn't make it to the can on time.
How much to pull oldman foreskin back to clean their dick cheese for the dudes; and for the girls, wash all the old lady perineum and boob flaps. All while they make the same gross, nasty, or ashamed comments. This might come as a surprise but even away from the dementia/alzheimer units, when people get stripped of their independence they tend to get really fuckin mean. Don't believe me, go up to any old person and strike up a conversation about them surrendering their license because they can't see good anymore. See how that plays out lol.
If youre not phased by the stomache curling grossness that is apart of your routine responsobilities, then youll love getting bitten, punched, kicked, or all around physically abused trying to feed, bath or any other basic care for your residents.
Added bonus if you're a female cuz you can add sexually harassed by disgustingly old men CONSTANTLY while being punished if you do anything but file a report that isn't going to go anywhere because it would mean kicking every old man out of the home and on the streets if they actually did anything about the reports.
But it's OK because you are just 15 mins away from clocking out, yay! BUT WAIT THERES MORE! The travel nurse agency that was sending staff for the shift that follows you calls and says soandso isn't going to make it in, leaving the next shift below the legal caretaker to resident ratio leaving you to be mandated for a minimum 4 more hours if the next next shift answers their phone and is willing to come in 4hrs early. If they don't, you get to do 8hrs, double yay!
Yes, these examples are specifically being drawn from my experience working in an under financed under staffed facility. With that being said, I will add that the ONLY real difference between my time working in low income/low staff facility and any of the top tier facilities in our area was just the pay, the benefits, the quality of tools/utilities/activities, plus the coworkers were better to work with because of how much better they treat the residents.
The pay and overtime pay was always excellent all the places I worked. Like I said it was right out of highschool working 60+ hours a week.
So one last time before I jump into explaining why you were wrong to help prevent you from looking dumb when you have erroneous opinions of how things you know nothing about work... how fuckin much? How much would it take for what i outlined to be your every single day life? Any number you name it because this might come as quite the surprise but there isn't any money sitting around in any of the under staffed, under funded nursing homes for their private owners to fet rich.
Good nursing homes pay for good nursing staff, to continue filling rooms with residents with good insurance, all because they are in wealthier communities with a history of caring for wealthy residents who fill beds with better to best tiers of insurance coverage.
Nursing homes that are rural or in any lower income-ish areas are going to have a much much much higher amount rate of residents where all they have is Medicare/caid.
Medicare isn't too bad but Medicaid pays the homes on average 1/3 less per resident than medicare which still isnt close to private insurances. A nursing home can't set their pricing at whatever they want either. They could price each bed at $1,000,000 a month but at the end of the month they are only guaranteed income they can count on is the amount a resident's insurance is going to cover. If any resident's 100 day window that Medicare covers runs out, the facility is dependent on the resident's family making payments on time for someone they barely spend 5 hrs a year with. Even if they go the Medicaid route after medicare or supplemental insurance too, unless it was pre-established, the facility will be stuck without income for that resident until they get approved.
Then they also turn over owners at a much higher rate too. Each usually assuming they can turn around these low priced private homes like some turn key business. The problem being, everything that happens in elderly homes, group homes and assisted care facilities is all dictated by regulations. So even if they wanted to lower operating costs, they're very very limited in their flexibility on everything. From material costs to salary/wage costs. They submit reports for every expense and revenue allocation.
I've wasted enough time on this topic. If you need sources, look up any number of medical journals available that look into the reason under funded and under staffed facilities rarely improve no matter how many new owners come in.
TLDR1: You should learn about how shit works before you argue about about it so you prevent yourself from sounding so stupid to people who have experience on the matter.
TLDR2: Nursing homes don't operate like private businesses do in an open market because of their only dependable source of income is determined by how much insurance companies are willing to cover. If people were getting rich off nursing homes there wouldn't be such high turnover rate in ownership.
Still the other person's point stands. It is a wage issue, but the questions isn't just "How much money do you want?", but alo "How much are you willing to do for that money?".
Since this post was originally about AI, let's return there. Many advances are being made with AI in elderlcare. Some more useful than others. Your point of people getting angry because they loose their independence is a recognised problem that people are trying to solve with technology, like communication apps and teaching elderly how to use technology to their benefit. But there are other solutions to think about. Like placing the facilities in a good location, where things like stores, hairdressers and restaurants are in walking distance. Or even making public transport more accessible. Also community is important. That has always been a struggle, but in the past decade I've seen a lot more events being organised in elder homes. Sometimes these events are organised internally, but there are also a lot of private companies who are trying to fill this need.
There are also a lot of technical innovations in care and monitoring. There are small, wearable heart rate monitors, blood sugar monitors, whatnot monitors, all kinds of monitors so nurses don't have to come by twuce a day to measure someone's values. There are smart diapers so you don't have to clean someone hours after the fact, but you'll get a notice immediately. Maybe there'll even be smart showers at some point. This takes a lot of pressure of the (still understaffed) nurses who don't have to walk as many rounds
All these advancements also mean that people will be able to live at home for longer and remain fairly independent for longer and therefor happier for longer.
So I think the question "How much are you willing to do for that money?" is not all the shit you said, but technology can help reduce the amount of shit you have to deal with. I think that, combined with better pay, better and fairer career chances, better treatment of lesser educated staff and more respect for the sector in general will make it so that more people are willing to choose nursing as a career.
That may be a lot to ask right now, but it's something to strive for as a society. We've got a lot of pessimists on this platform, but I've met a lot of good people in the sector that are already working hard to make it better and are making steps every day.
P.s. I don't work in elderly care, but I used to work for a company that delivered care aids to elderly people living at home.
I apologize for the.abrasive comments in the thread but it really grinds my gears when people think they can argue with someone who has been shit deep in experience while they have zero empirical rhetoric on the topic. My entire point has been that it isn't a case of rich getting richer while their employees drown in the weeds. It's a broken system top to bottom that cannot provide adequate compensation for a job that requires minimal training regardless of how mosserable the work is. A broken system designed and regulated by our broken government.
That's awesome that AI is helping reduce the stress for the industry for the boots on the ground employees. However it'd be better news to find we are using AI to expose the actual cost to revenue gaps being negotiated between the pharmaceutical players and the health insurance players. Equally as encouraging would be using AI to fix our broken Medicare/Medicaid system that leave people out to dry once an arbitrary limit is reached.
I spent most my years in the industry working in the dementia and alzheimer units. If we had little fuckin AI bots to give residents to engage with, it would've been a godsend. I fuckin hated when a resident would still have lingering brief moments of lucidity and look right at you with this look of fear and confusion. In that moment of lucidity they remember things from their old life but won't have a lock of a clue who I was or any of the hundreds of daily interactions I would have with them when they weren't lucid. We were taught and I think it's still S.O.P. to avoid correcting dimential/alz residents and to instead redirect their attention to something that will relax them. AI would be fuckin amazing for that. Helping the aids is fine a dandy but at the end of the day, the most help ypu could provide an aide is a tool that would help the residents enjoy life again and not hate that they need help and take it out on staff.
My point stands: pay enough, and people will do the job, shitty as it is. Same as garbage sorters (all the garbage at my local landfill is sorted, with easy recyclables like aluminum being pulled out, manually; it's a shit job but they pay well).
If the money isn't there to pay well, that's a fault in the system itself, but I've seen enough of capitalist and especially American economics to know that the money probably is there, they just don't want to pay it. Whether it's the nursing homes themselves or the insurance companies doing the grifting doesn't actually matter; somebody is profiting, and profit is theft.
If your guna just argue to be a cunt then atleast know what you are talking about.
Before I go into detail explaining how it actually works, I have to know, how much?
How much to wash old liver spotted asses covered in shit and piss every time you do rounds which is 3 times per shift for as many as 15 residents per round; then between rounds clean more shit off the lucid residents that didn't make it to the can on time.
How much to pull oldman foreskin back to clean their dick cheese for the dudes; and for the girls, wash all the old lady perineum and boob flaps. All while they make the same gross, nasty, or ashamed comments. This might come as a surprise but even away from the dementia/alzheimer units, when people get stripped of their independence they tend to get really fuckin mean. Don't believe me, go up to any old person and strike up a conversation about them surrendering their license because they can't see good anymore. See how that plays out lol.
If youre not phased by the stomache curling grossness that is apart of your routine responsobilities, then youll love getting bitten, punched, kicked, or all around physically abused trying to feed, bath or any other basic care for your residents.
Added bonus if you're a female cuz you can add sexually harassed by disgustingly old men CONSTANTLY while being punished if you do anything but file a report that isn't going to go anywhere because it would mean kicking every old man out of the home and on the streets if they actually did anything about the reports.
But it's OK because you are just 15 mins away from clocking out, yay! BUT WAIT THERES MORE! The travel nurse agency that was sending staff for the shift that follows you calls and says soandso isn't going to make it in, leaving the next shift below the legal caretaker to resident ratio leaving you to be mandated for a minimum 4 more hours if the next next shift answers their phone and is willing to come in 4hrs early. If they don't, you get to do 8hrs, double yay!
Yes, these examples are specifically being drawn from my experience working in an under financed under staffed facility. With that being said, I will add that the ONLY real difference between my time working in low income/low staff facility and any of the top tier facilities in our area was just the pay, the benefits, the quality of tools/utilities/activities, plus the coworkers were better to work with because of how much better they treat the residents.
The pay and overtime pay was always excellent all the places I worked. Like I said it was right out of highschool working 60+ hours a week.
So one last time before I jump into explaining why you were wrong to help prevent you from looking dumb when you have erroneous opinions of how things you know nothing about work... how fuckin much? How much would it take for what i outlined to be your every single day life? Any number you name it because this might come as quite the surprise but there isn't any money sitting around in any of the under staffed, under funded nursing homes for their private owners to fet rich.
Good nursing homes pay for good nursing staff, to continue filling rooms with residents with good insurance, all because they are in wealthier communities with a history of caring for wealthy residents who fill beds with better to best tiers of insurance coverage.
Nursing homes that are rural or in any lower income-ish areas are going to have a much much much higher amount rate of residents where all they have is Medicare/caid.
Medicare isn't too bad but Medicaid pays the homes on average 1/3 less per resident than medicare which still isnt close to private insurances. A nursing home can't set their pricing at whatever they want either. They could price each bed at $1,000,000 a month but at the end of the month they are only guaranteed income they can count on is the amount a resident's insurance is going to cover. If any resident's 100 day window that Medicare covers runs out, the facility is dependent on the resident's family making payments on time for someone they barely spend 5 hrs a year with. Even if they go the Medicaid route after medicare or supplemental insurance too, unless it was pre-established, the facility will be stuck without income for that resident until they get approved.
Then they also turn over owners at a much higher rate too. Each usually assuming they can turn around these low priced private homes like some turn key business. The problem being, everything that happens in elderly homes, group homes and assisted care facilities is all dictated by regulations. So even if they wanted to lower operating costs, they're very very limited in their flexibility on everything. From material costs to salary/wage costs. They submit reports for every expense and revenue allocation.
I've wasted enough time on this topic. If you need sources, look up any number of medical journals available that look into the reason under funded and under staffed facilities rarely improve no matter how many new owners come in.
TLDR1: You should learn about how shit works before you argue about about it so you prevent yourself from sounding so stupid to people who have experience on the matter.
TLDR2: Nursing homes don't operate like private businesses do in an open market because of their only dependable source of income is determined by how much insurance companies are willing to cover. If people were getting rich off nursing homes there wouldn't be such high turnover rate in ownership.