Helsinki hospitals severely overcrowded, emergency rooms full to capacity

[dohdhdaa]

“Shortage of nurses”

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

[pj_mukh]

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...

[monero-xmr]

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

[oifjsidjf]

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.

[mensetmanusman]

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.

[slothtrop]

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.

[gruez]

"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.

[jmyeet]

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).

[xboxnolifes]

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.

[Tagbert]

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.

[foxyv]

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.

[albertopv]

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

[weberer]

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

[streblo]

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.

[rr888]

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.

[forthwithof]

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.

[doikor]

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

[jks]

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...

[dezgeg]

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.

[mchaver]

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

[pjmlp]

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

[betaby]

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.

[benjaminwootton]

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.

[rr888]

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

[SketchySeaBeast]

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.

[kodyo]

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