Helsinki hospitals severely overcrowded, emergency rooms full to capacity

https://yle.fi/a/74-20008564

by weberer • 4 years ago

46 84 4 years ago

yle.fi

dohdhdaa• 4 years ago

“Shortage of nurses”

There is no such thing as a shortage of labor. There are only shortages of wages. They should have paid more.

monero-xmr• 4 years ago

Not if you have licensing and immigration rules that make it impossible for new people to enter the field in response to a demand surge

Avicebron• 4 years ago

So what your saying is that instead of paying more we should import cheap labor at the expense of anyone who might be a nurse locally? Therefore depressing all wages across the board?..

p0pcult2• 4 years ago

If, as you say, this is a demand surge, classical economics would suggest that the price of the demanded good/service should go up.

The article, however, is very clear that this is a supply issue, and not a "demand surge."

In either case, it seems that equilibrium would set wages higher.

albertopv2• 4 years ago

There could be, at least in Italy demographic crisis is already here.

shapefrog• 4 years ago

If they paid a billion $ a week to be a nurse there would not be a shortage of nurses.

rr8882• 4 years ago

Not really. If its appropriately staffed for most of the year, then there is a crunch period its realistically better to suffer the crunch than have excess staff for most of the year.

streblo• 4 years ago

I'm sorry but this is a really poorly informed opinion. You actually can have a shortage of labor - see e.g. countries like Japan and Russia, where the demographics are very skewed towards the geriatric, and you literally have more jobs than people to do them. Birth rates in these countries have been too low to keep populations stable, and as people retire you wind up with a labor shortage.

This is starting to happen all over the world as the global baby boomer generation is aging into retirement. It's started to happen in most of western Europe, China, Japan, Russia, even the US. It's absolutely not a wage issue, it's a demographic issue.

tpetry• 4 years ago

They are correct. If the pay would be better more people would learn to do it.

oifjsidjf• 4 years ago

This. It's the same in a country where I live in which has a sociliazed health care.

Nurses and young doctors are paid like shit so they're obviously all quitting and those that remain get so much more workload they they eventually also quit.

And then the ministers/politicians complain that "the doctors and nurses have no right to protest again" lol.

FullMetalBitch2• 4 years ago

You can either have well paid healthcare personal or socialized health care you can't have both, specially when population is shrinking which is why healthcare across Europe (and Canada) are having the same issues.

gruez• 4 years ago

"Shortage of homes"

There's no such thing as a housing shortage. There are only shortages of money. You should have paid more for homes.

slowmotiony• 4 years ago

Well yeah, that's exactly the case. There might be a shortage of affordable homes in big metropolitan cities, but there's certainly no shortage of houses in general.

Retric4• 4 years ago

Housing isn’t a free market, the supply is artificially constrained.

The supply of nurses can grow and shrink arbitrarily in response to demand.

pj_mukh• 4 years ago

Two things can be true:

-> Nurses don't get paid enough, and should be paid like tech workers for the work they do

-> Demographics changes means there simply aren't enough bodies to become nurses. This is especially true in the west now. Ontario in Canada is facing the same problem[1].

[1] https://www.ona.org/news-posts/20221117-nurse-staffing-repor...

RestlessMind3• 4 years ago

Demographics changes means there simply aren't enough bodies to become nurses.

True. This is a direct consequence of people refusing to have kids. What may be a sensible decision at an individual level is going to have disastrous consequences for societies; particularly the advanced homogeneous ones who have the unique combination of falling birthrates, generous welfare programs which need taxpayers and who are averse to immigrants from a very different culture.

Countries like USA should fare relatively better since it is easy to assimilate young people from any other country. My prediction is that small nation states in Western/Northern Europe will be the first ones to break.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Canada is a terrible example. Like 90% of applicants who try to get into nursing school are rejected... Plus wages should be higher. Plus the work kind of sucks. It's a crisis that's *entirely* our governments' doing.

dirtyid• 4 years ago

Demographics can cause aggregate worker shortage, but not enough that industrial poilcy can't fully staffing specific sectors.

jmyeet• 4 years ago

This is usually the correct take. Labor shortages are typically propaganda for below-market wages. This should be your default assumption whenever you hear about any labor shortage until there's evidene otherwise.

Here I think it's a little different. First, you can't just mint new nurses. That takes time. Second, a lot of nurses have left the profession (or at least specialties like ER and ICU) because of years of stress dealing with the fallout of the pandemic.

Nurses were at one point and in some locations quite literally choosing who gets to live and die. If you don't think that puts stress on someone, combined with being overworked, I'm not sure what to tell you. So it's not just an issue of money to lure them back, particularly when (later on) so much of this death was entirely self-inflicted (ie people choosing not to be unvaccinated).

rdtwo7• 4 years ago

You shouldn’t put so much blame on individuals. The excess death are mostly a result of really poorly executed public health policies and messaging. Government officials, lied to everyone and sowed a lot disinformation and that caused mistrust and poor infection control. The resulting public health chaos resulted excess death, and people believing all sorts of wacky stuff.

slothtrop• 4 years ago

In the long-run, but this also works both ways. On one hand the recent years have resulted in hospitals rapidly going over capacity, and nurses quitting from overwork. But nurses have negotiated higher pay in general, on top of things like hazard pay. That can lead to shortages if hospitals can't/won't afford to pay for sufficient staff. Moreover, hospitals (particularly places like US) seem to have an economic incentive to keep staff low during tighter periods because good nursing staff does not reflect billable service.

In Finland, they'll expect an average of 13% raise in wages from 2022-2025 - https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2... . There's no reason to believe that shortages are solely owing to insufficient pay.

mensetmanusman3• 4 years ago

False.

With population decline and a shrinking workforce, the labor market takes time to readjust to the new norm of lower wealth (because lack of labor in one area means less output of services/goods).

For wages to increase taxes have to increase which also reduces viability of certain low margin businesses and further decreases societal wealth in that area of the economy. It’s all a trade off under the new reality.

kodyo3• 4 years ago

The nonsense words that people have to invent to explain socialism are extraordinary.

drcongo• 4 years ago

False.

You don't need to increase taxes to increase wages - you could actually collect the taxes that are due but being funnelled off into offshore accounts, you could limit the bonuses being paid to CEOs while workers struggle to heat their homes, you could cut military spending, you could not give £35B of public money to a few mates in exchange for them pretending to supply PPE. The list goes on.

foxyv• 4 years ago

I agree completely. Also, it would also help if we didn't treat nurses like garbage. If we offered stuff like paid time off, sick leave, and appropriate levels of staffing. If we didn't lay off half of them and expected the other half to do twice the work.

Tagbert3• 4 years ago

If you paid more, you still need to wait for new nursing candidates to be trained. They don’t just walk in off the street.

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

That doesn't really apply when your labor pool requires years of training for a job. In such case you very much can have labor shortages disconnected from wage.

weberer• 4 years ago

That's pretty much exactly what happened. Nurses demanded higher pay. Government said no. Nurses threatened to strike. Government said they can't do that. Nurses threatened to resign in mass. Government passed a new law forbidding that. Now the government is trying to replace them with 20,000 nurses from third-world countries. And do note that this is all under the left-wing coalition currently in power.

https://yle.fi/a/3-12630457

https://yle.fi/a/3-12681978

forthwithof• 4 years ago

This is a long time systemic issue that has been like watching a trainwreck in slowmotion. We're reaping what we've consicously sown over the years. Severe underallocation of resources has lead to very low salaries and heavy overworking conditions as more and more people leave the industry.

benjaminwootton• 4 years ago

I see anecdotally on Twitter and a lot of countries subreddits that there is a huge surge of illness right now. Pretty much everyone I know also has some cough/cold/flu thing going on too.

This all feels more acute than Covid ever did but isn’t getting any airtime.

SketchySeaBeast• 4 years ago

I think you may not be paying attention to the news - at least here in Canada there has been a discussion since the fall started and the rate of illness skyrocketed.

mensetmanusman3• 4 years ago

It’s interesting because people predicting that the rate of increase of common illnesses would skyrocket due to lockdowns were labeled fake news two years ago.

kodyo3• 4 years ago

It's getting airtime here, but there's a lot of tiptoeing around the topic of the last three years of radical interventionism.

rr8882• 4 years ago

I've seen a lot of airtime. Google tripledemic. NYC recommends wearing masks again.

mchaver3• 4 years ago

Here is another ongoing discussion about healthcare in US vs Canada and Europe. Overall, I think the situation will get worse with demographic changes (more retired people that need more access to doctors and less medical staff) and higher taxes (pre-existing national debt, less workers than retired people collecting benefits).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33977716

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

And the usual closed borders that prevent people that could eventually refill those positions.

mchaver3• 4 years ago

The border is just the first step. Afterwards you have to get medical licenses certified which can take years and may require extra coursework.

For example, Spain makes it easier for citizens of ex-Spanish colonies to access citizenship. If they have medical degrees from their home countries, the process to certify them may take years. Afterwards, the public system likely doesn't have a budget to hire them and they end up working for the private system.

doikor2• 4 years ago

The title is partly wrong (badly translated).

Actual emergency services still function and have capacity. What is full/out of capacity is walking into the clinic with smaller issues. Basically if you don't have some immediately life threatening condition it is very likely that you will be sent to another hospital (or told to come back later). Obviously doing this can also have some very bad patient outcomes.

This is partly also due to the fact that the emergency services know what hospital has space and route the ambulance to one that has space. A normal person walking in does not know that.

Here is roughly the same article in Finnish https://yle.fi/a/74-20008425

dezgeg• 4 years ago

Not sure if I got the same interpretation (both languages on YLE and HS one seem quite ambiguous).

My interpretation I got is Jorvi cannot even admit in patients from ambulances for urgent care, wheras Töölö, Peijas and Hyvinkää have all beds full.

jks• 4 years ago

Some emergency rooms are full because there is no place to send patients for further care. The emergency room is not supposed to be a place to spend a lot of time, they just treat your immediate life-threatening problem and then send you either home or to a hospital bed. But when hospital beds and elderly care units are full, the patients stay in the emergency rooms.

I suspect (but do not know for certain) that part of the reason is the big social and healthcare reform that is to take place in 2023. The responsibility for arranging healthcare lies on municipalities and is going to be transferred to new, euphemistically named "wellbeing services counties". This means that each municipality loses some funds from their budget, and the amount depends on their social-services and healthcare budgets for 2022. This means that keeping the budget artificially low this year means they have more money available for other purposes next year (schools, roads, libraries, what have you).

Here's an article (in Finnish) from 2021 discussing this risk: https://www.iltalehti.fi/politiikka/a/21899c53-d959-4383-a75...

betaby• 4 years ago

I suppose the same problem as in Canada: population is growing (being that due to immigration/refuges/natural births) while number of seats in medical universities doesn't grow with the rate of population.

Helsinki hospitals severely overcrowded, emergency rooms full to capacity

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