The organizations that employ healthcare workers, and indirectly the organizations that pay for healthcare, do not want to pay sufficient wages to incentivize people to work in the roles needed to provide the level of healthcare expected by the population.
Instead of fixing the remuneration so that people are incentivized to work in healthcare, the easier solution for leaders is to “draft” who chose to be eligible to be drafted in emergencies and have them work. In reality, this is simply displacing healthcare workers from elsewhere.
It is leaders of today destroying trust in emergency organizations, protocols, and structure to avoid paying higher wages. Why would anyone sign up for national guard when your role includes having to work because of insufficient wages causing lack of supply of labor?
This really doesn’t have anything to do with wages. Healthcare staff just don’t exist in the quantities we need right now.
It’s a worst case scenario with a bunch declaring early retirement, even more changing professions due to COVID trauma, and lack of proper pipelines of staff.
This has everything to do with wages. Nurse to patient ratios have been getting smaller and smaller for many years now. It is a common topic in medical forums.
It is combined with a worst case scenario, but it is compounded by the fact that a parent or young person is going to look at Mar 2020 and decide to not go into nursing because all they got was a sign saying they were heroes in exchange for working with an infectious disease, while many others got to sit at home on their computers.
The situation for nursing homes is even worse than hospitals and nurses. It actually terrified me, even pre pandemic, to think about the level of care I would get if I had to be in an assisted living facility being taken care of by someone earning $12 per hour also taking care of 19 other people. I would rather opt for suicide.
It matters in the grand scheme. The pandemic started 21 months ago, and there is still insignificant movement in wages.
Also, if you offered 20-30x, the people would exist (for your facility). And if you offer 2-3x market rate and cannot attract people, then not only is x not the market rate, but 2-3x is not either.
The article says that about 150 of the 1050 troops deployed are medically trained. Most will be providing support services where needed.
The national guard exists to answer the call of the state governor for all sorts of things. You’ll also see them deployed for state emergencies like a hurricane or tornado.
Think of it as a quick to mobilize population of volunteers that are trained to do various things.
Yes this is one of the main benefits of having military type orgs available even if not in conflict - you have a group of proven competent people, trained to execute orders that you can deploy into a variety if situations where people power is useful/important. The British Army were used for the 2012 Olympic as marshals etc as G4S messed up the preparations.
FTA:> “Earlier in the pandemic, our concern in our hospitals was about beds, was about space, today is about personnel,” DeWine said. “22 months. 22 months of this pandemic has taken its toll on our health care workers, and that is certainly, certainly understandable.”
> Of the 1,050 national guard troops being deployed, about 150 are medically trained personnel who can assist in helping patients. DeWine insisted that he and Adjutant General John Harris have worked together to ensure the deployment won’t mean pulling people away from a hospital day job to go work at a different hospital. The remaining 900 troops will be tasked with support services.
> “They will do many things to help the hospitals in this time of great, great crisis,” DeWine said. “It will involve transport within the hospital, food and the environmental work that goes on in hospitals and is so very important every single day.”
This is not unique to the USA, e.g. in the Netherlands the army assists in testing and vaccination campaigns [1]. This is just common sense, those organisations have a large number of people (who in peacetime have not much more to do than exercise and maintain their equipment) who are trained to act in a short times notice and can deploy facilities which are not available to civil authorities.
Because our hospitals are over capacity - specifically well over 100% nurse to patient capacity - the guard members will likely be helping with all of the non-medical work nurses would normally do in non pandemic times. Stuff like cleanup, re-supply of rooms and supply closets, maybe some check in work that sort of thing.
