Nurses in Denmark shift to cosmetic care despite hospital staffing crisis – DSR believes shift is due to salary and working conditions

Normal work hours, no risk of getting called into work at odd hours, better pay and you’re not treating trauma patients. It’s no wonder in my mind. We need to compensate our nurses better here in Denmark, or this trend will never shift. We’ve seen nurses turn to Norway for years, this is nothing new, really.

“What I found challenging [working in public hospitals] was that I constantly had to compromise on the level of service I could provide,” Adsersen told DR.

“[When working in public hospitals] I often felt like going home from work thinking, ‘Oh, I turned the other cheek there,’ or ‘I couldn’t deal with that because I was so pressured’,” she added.

The Danish Nurses’ Organisation (DSR) believes that the increase in the number of nurses turning to cosmetics is a sign that they want better pay and working conditions.

“I could easily work in the public sector occasionally or help out in emergency situations, but the working conditions are just too poor,” Adsersen said.

This lady seems to be describing moral injury, which is as unfortunate as it is unsurprising. And now, what a precarious position the entire system has been maneuvered in. This usually goes one of two entirely predictable ways, which I won’t bother typing out, as I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of them by this point, especially post-COVID.

And this:

“It is not the individual nurse’s responsibility to ensure that there are enough nurses in the public healthcare system. It is the politicians and the Danish regions that are responsible for the operation of the hospitals,” Dorthe Boe Danbjørg, chair of the DSR, told broadcaster DR.

Too right.

This is what happens when you structure your entire society to worship money, greed, selfishness. When everything is about obtaining, and having more, and spending. Even someone modest and humble wants to, needs to, spend, because everything costs and nothing's cheap anymore.

People who want those modest, humble lives, people for whom the concept of "no, I have enough" aren't just considered suckers. They're treated like it. Others, who are busy plotting and scheming their next step of obtaining, look at these who aren't and think "man, what a waste. Think of what they could be doing if they'd just try to take, to advance, to get more."

That's what the global economy is built on; more. Always more. Wanting, needing, getting. Everything runs through money, and none of what you can buy with it is modest or affordable. The suppliers, the factories, the businesses, the owners, they want more, and they make sure their prices reflect that. So even the simple, quiet, content people are still being squeezed. Flashy shit isn't just expensive; basic staples, basic utilities, basic everything has been turned into vast profit centers that squeeze and take and punish.

Society needs roles that don't just take, but for anyone to want to fill those roles, society has to acknowledge the value appropriately. Which we don't do anymore.

Teachers and nurses, for example, are traditionally thought of as "giving" roles. A job and life goal designed around wanting to give back to your society. Except kids, even adults, look at their options and wonder why they should give when everyone else is taking.

Go to school for four (or more) years to get "properly trained" to teach, or to care for the injured ... or become a lawyer, accountant, MBA, programmer, and so on. You could toil away in squalor, under paid and over burdened by expectation ... or you can just file papers and pump code that lands cash in your account. Cash you can use to jetset and jetski and jet off to enjoy yourself with.

It's no big surprise that America has a problem with teachers and nurses being considered suckers. An outlook that makes them increasingly scarce. But now the Nordic countries, which most of the world tends to consider a more genteel and collective type of society, are having the same problem. People from societies where they supposedly have more of an "all for one" attitude are looking at their options and saying "fuck it, I want the money. Or, at least, I want the same money with remarkably less stress and weight."

The capitalistic answer to a shortage is for the price to go up. The moment, for example, UBI is raised people tumble out of the woodwork to instantly and stridently screech about how everything will immediately become more expensive if money is "being handed out for free." Because UBI means food and rent and everything is more scarce since more people aren't dead broke, and they'll spend, and that'll increase scarcity.

But, somehow, when it's labor involved, crickets. Companies will move Heaven and Earth to not pay more, and societies will back them while trying to leverage "messaging" to convince citizens to fill the needed roles. They shame, they offer pizza parties, they use platitudes and cheap (but showy) incentives; they do everything except what the fundamentals of the system that's created the shortage prescribe.

They don't sweeten the deal. They just bemoan how no one wants to take the shit deal.

Why spend fifty plus hours a week on your feet, being battered and bruised by patients (who are angry they're being fiscally squeezed, who are also irritable and impatient because they're also often in pain or gripped by fear over their medical condition) for a laughable wage that still leaves you struggling to cover rent, car, car insurance, grocery bills, utilities ... and little at all left to enjoy life with?

Why do that when you could sit in an office typing on a keyboard at a tech startup, maybe being offered stock options. Or punching the clock at a big corp with a nine to five where maybe they don't pay super great, but at least it's predictable and you get coffee breaks.

Why give back to society when society is busy ensuring no one gives you jack shit? Gee, I wonder. Why is it so hard to find teachers and nurses? What could it be...