Big Tech and Wall Street are deploying an on-demand “Uber for nursing” model that’s racking up hundreds of millions in investments while creating unsafe, high-stress conditions for nurses and patients — all to solve a nursing shortage that doesn’t really exist.
The influx of patients and lack of resources during the COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented levels of burnout among nurses. The subsequent rise of gig-nursing platforms like CareRev, ShiftKey, and ShiftMed has been heralded as a way to bring in more nurses and provide these workers with additional flexibility.
However, amid growing public outcry over the state of the country’s health care system, a new study published by researchers at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, found that these on-demand nursing apps can create high-risk, low-reward working conditions that endanger medical professionals and patients alike.
“These apps encourage nurses to work for less pay, fail to provide certainty about scheduling and the amount or nature of work, take little to no accountability for worker safety, and can threaten patient well-being by placing nurses in unfamiliar clinical environments with no onboarding or facility training,” the study’s authors wrote.
Companies in the newly formed gig-nursing industry have also been lobbying on labor rules that could allow them to shortchange nurses, further reducing the quality of patient care.
On-demand nursing services fail to address decades of health care consolidation by for-profit corporations that have pushed bare-minimum staffing and high-risk work environments as a way to save money, said Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the progressive economic policy think tank Groundwork Collaborative who coauthored the…
Auteur: Helen Santoro
