Veterinarians in Canada say they are experiencing extreme burnout and plummeting mental health due to staff shortages, a booming number of animal patients and the round-the-clock stress of the job. Ne...
I left healthcare 2 years ago. Most people are leaving these positions because of lean business practices leading to severe burnout. We would have no problems filling open positions if there was proper staffing and proper compensation. And I don’t believe that money is the sole issue. When you are trying to do the job of multiple people and find yourself not being effective in helping patients because of elements outside of your control, you end up realizing that what money your are getting is no longer worth the hit to your mental health. People that choose these positions genuinely want to help others but there is a breaking point and we are seeing it in real time right now.
Oh, but it is. ‘Provider’ is but one layer needing more and more money to compensate for effort and risk.
Money is the grease driving all layers of this direct-pay-for-care model; including the incentives driving each round of executive cost-shaving, because that’s how management earns incentives. And while the output is executive bonuses, the input - what this feeds on - is people and their money and their coping and happiness. More and more. Custom-uh, patients pay more, care-givers work more, actual care is reduced, managers deal with more turnover, and execs buy lambos.
If you want to see a care system that is at risk but usable, look at the happiest countries. And then understand why that’s at risk and decide whether we want to preserve it. Unfortunately, care-givers and other layers of the machine who no longer have to lay out hard cash for every effort and action will see their paycheques drop with those costs, and that’ll make them sad if that’s how they derive validation.
And while I’m talking about human acute care, mostly, the same goes for long-term care, veterinarian, and even ancillary-to-care sectors like transit. Greed at all levels in a zero-sum model makes victims of the people it’s supposed to care for.
I left healthcare 2 years ago. Most people are leaving these positions because of lean business practices leading to severe burnout. We would have no problems filling open positions if there was proper staffing and proper compensation. And I don’t believe that money is the sole issue. When you are trying to do the job of multiple people and find yourself not being effective in helping patients because of elements outside of your control, you end up realizing that what money your are getting is no longer worth the hit to your mental health. People that choose these positions genuinely want to help others but there is a breaking point and we are seeing it in real time right now.
Oh, but it is. ‘Provider’ is but one layer needing more and more money to compensate for effort and risk.
Money is the grease driving all layers of this direct-pay-for-care model; including the incentives driving each round of executive cost-shaving, because that’s how management earns incentives. And while the output is executive bonuses, the input - what this feeds on - is people and their money and their coping and happiness. More and more. Custom-uh, patients pay more, care-givers work more, actual care is reduced, managers deal with more turnover, and execs buy lambos.
If you want to see a care system that is at risk but usable, look at the happiest countries. And then understand why that’s at risk and decide whether we want to preserve it. Unfortunately, care-givers and other layers of the machine who no longer have to lay out hard cash for every effort and action will see their paycheques drop with those costs, and that’ll make them sad if that’s how they derive validation.
And while I’m talking about human acute care, mostly, the same goes for long-term care, veterinarian, and even ancillary-to-care sectors like transit. Greed at all levels in a zero-sum model makes victims of the people it’s supposed to care for.