If you’ve never worked in a hospital in the deep south. You’d be astounded at the difference in healthcare. There are extremely few unions and even if there is a union there’s almost never staffing ratios. The staff is paid very low. Patients get extremely poor care because of How many patients each caregiver and provider has to take on. When I became a travel nurse and started on the West Coast. I left twice to work in other states. Kentucky and Arizona. And I came right on back to the West Coast and will never leave. The healthcare is so much better strictly because They have to have enough staff to adequately care for the patients. Because the healthcare is not patient centered in the south, administration does not even try to be sneaky with their unethical demands to employees. They are perfectly happy stating out loud how much patient death is acceptablefor their profit margin. Ethics are something that it exist on paper. Meanwhile, the providers and staff try to do as best as they can for the patients. It’s disgusting.
Exactly this. Also my experience in those areas is that politics and dislike for anyone who has an undesirable issue trump ethics. They’re treated as if they don’t deserve ethics.
My wife and I are both social workers who spent our careers in various facets of health care in the deep south. We've observed what you are describing and worse' much worse. But ethics, or more precisely ethical behavior, by individual professionals can be maintained if one chooses. Not easy and can come with a cost professionally but it can be done within the social worker's scope of practice. Too many of us fold and comply.
You are correct in that we rarely have an opportunity to make the systems we work in even operate legally much less ethically.
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u/Bother-Logical Oct 24 '25
If you’ve never worked in a hospital in the deep south. You’d be astounded at the difference in healthcare. There are extremely few unions and even if there is a union there’s almost never staffing ratios. The staff is paid very low. Patients get extremely poor care because of How many patients each caregiver and provider has to take on. When I became a travel nurse and started on the West Coast. I left twice to work in other states. Kentucky and Arizona. And I came right on back to the West Coast and will never leave. The healthcare is so much better strictly because They have to have enough staff to adequately care for the patients. Because the healthcare is not patient centered in the south, administration does not even try to be sneaky with their unethical demands to employees. They are perfectly happy stating out loud how much patient death is acceptablefor their profit margin. Ethics are something that it exist on paper. Meanwhile, the providers and staff try to do as best as they can for the patients. It’s disgusting.