Welcome back, me!

Hello, readers! Sorry for the long delay in publishing. I was on maternity leave and now I’m back and it has taken a little while to get acclimated. I have a few big stories coming up but you will hear about those soon (I hope.) For now, I’m just going to share a story I did last week that’s been making the rounds of the Internet.

Stop Saying There’s a Nursing Shortage

You may remember (but probably don’t) that in 2021, I extensively covered the trucking industry. I wrote about how truck driver training is terrible, and about how many people quit in their first months or years as a trucker because the job initially is very miserable. I wrote about a trucker who was murdered by his co-driver (many first trucking jobs are with a ‘co-driver’ who is supposed to show you the ropes.) I bought a stuffed giraffe from the Internet and followed its extremely slow progress to my house, including on ships, trains, and a trucks.

And I wrote about how, despite many publications saying that there was a shortage of truck drivers during the supply chain crisis, that was not true. What was actually happening was that a lot of people were getting trained as truck drivers, and then, realizing how terrible the job was and how little they actually got paid, they quit and did something else.

I thought about that story recently when I read about a rise of “Uber for nursing” gig apps in which hospitals can hire nurses for a day because they were short-staffed. The apps themselves, which have names like ShiftKey, ShiftMed, and CareRev, claim to be “tackling healthcare’s labor crisis” but in reality, according to researchers, are just driving down wages and benefits for healthcare workers. The more I read about these apps, the more I recognized a familiar story: employer squeezes worker, and then claims it can’t find enough workers.

I talked to a professor at Penn who had many, many studies to confirm my thesis. Nursing, she found, has gotten worse since the pandemic, since many hospitals are cutting back on staff. Many nurses are more burned out than ever, and they cite insufficient staffing as the reason. The rise of for-profit hospitals and private-equity backed hospitals hasn’t helped, since those hospitals have been found to cut staff more frequently. Many hospitals have turned to technology like virtual sitters, which actually put more pressure on nurses.

I sympathize for some hospital administrators—hospitals are having a rough go of it right now with insufficient Medicaid compensation (more on this soon.) But studies have repeatedly showed that investing in nursing more than pays off with better patient outcomes, which means hospitals save money since they lose money the longer a patient stays in the hospital. And there is a solution—California has mandated nursing staffing ratios and it appears to reduce burnout.

Read the story here:

Stop Saying There’s a Nursing Shortage

Books to Fall Asleep To

To refresh your memory, I end this newsletter with a recommendation of an audiobook I listen to at night to help me fall asleep. This is not an insult to the book, if it is boring (or if the narrator is bad), I won’t listen. Today I’m going to recommend Radio Free Afghanistan, a book by Saad Mohseni, whose girlfriend, to his dismay, once called him the “Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan.” Mohseni’s family fled Afghanistan in 1979, but returned following the U.S.’s war on terror (and on Afghanistan) in 2001. They launched a radio station in 2003 and built it into a television network, and still tried to run it once the U.S. left and the Taliban took over in 2021.