Labor Day post: Economic Impact of Nursing

From Brownie et al. (2017): Healthcare access impacts almost every human indicator including maternal/child mortality rates, rates of preventable infectious and noncommunicable disease, employability, gender equality, workforce productivity, trends in mortality rates and more… Several hospital-based studies can be cited to illustrate nursing impacts; for example, increasing the ratio and educational level of nursing staff…

Nurse employment and wage trends

Recent news articles have spilled much ink about the current nurse shortage. According to Pew, due to nursing shortages “Hospitals nationwide are canceling nonemergency surgeries, struggling to quickly find beds for patients and failing to meet the minimum nurse-patient ratios experts recommend.” Nursing wages are rising as well. The Baltimore Sun reports that the University…

Nursing shortages

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the worst part of the pandemic is largely past us (see NYT graph) with more people getting vaccinated. One would expect that as vaccine uptake has risen and cases have fallen, interest in the nursing profession would rise and those who left the nursing profession due to COVID-19 may return.…

Machine learning and physician employement

An article by Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb (“The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence“) provide an interesting perspective on how machine learning will affect employment with a nice example from the health care sector. All human activities can be described by five high-level components: data, prediction, judgment, action, and outcomes. For example, a visit to the…

How important is having a good nurse?

Perhaps unfairly, doctors get all the credit. When patients have better health outcomes, physicians are rewarded; when they have worse health outcomes, the physician is blamed. However, the quality of nurses also likely affects the quality of care that patients receive. A recent paper by Yakusheva, Lindrooth and Weiss (2014) finds that nurse quality does…

Will Nurses Steal Market Share from Physicians?

Currently, physicians are the dominant force in determining how health care is provided in the United States today.  Nurses, however, also play a vital role in the provision of health care services.  Although there are about 660,000 physicians in the U.S., there are 2.6 million registered nurses and another 750,000 LPNs. Leveraging the skills of…