Who's Reading Your X-Ray? (gggrrrrrrrrr

[Noordam]

I was reading about ATT outsourcing to India. And having been out of work for 30 months and in the IT business all I can say is GRRRRr..

OK so I did some research, first to an Indian outsourcing company http://www.wipro.com/

That lead me to this piece of shit article on how L1 and H-1B visa people are GREAT for the US economy... http://www.nasscom.org/artdisplay.asp?Art_id=2047 (note nasscom is the Indian organization of software companies.)

BUT hold your horses, if you can get Indians and Russians to work for 1/10 the price, how many other jobs are at risk.....

http://www.starbanner.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031116/ZNYT04/311160307/1009/BUSINESS

"SANJAY SAINI was not prepared for the hate mail. A radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Saini thought he had found a clever way to relieve an acute shortage of specialists who could read X-rays and M.R.I. scans. The hospital would beam images electronically from some scans to India, to be worked on by radiologists there. But the arrangement, made late last year with a company in India, has touched off a minor furor. It turns out that even American radiologists, with their years of training and annual salaries of $250,000 or more, worry about their jobs moving to countries with lower wages, in much the same way that garment knitters, blast-furnace operators and data-entry clerks do."

..cut...

"This teleradiology thing is another nail in the coffin of the job market," wrote someone on the Web site who identified himself as a radiologist. "Who needs to pay us $350,000/yr if they can get a cheap Indian radiologist for $25,000/yr."

While the article is long, and does point out some problems doing "teleradiology " they are nothing Whistle-Ass could have changed to help his business buds.

There are 30,000+ radiologist in the US. The moving of this non-contact hospital job overseas would save the hospitals
8.25 Billion a Year

(30,000 * $300,000) - ( 30,000 * $25,000)


What would these radiologist do for a living if their job was outsourced?

How many other hospital jobs could be done overseas.

What other high dollar jobs that have no contact could be moved overseas??????????

[Heddi]

1. This really cheeses me off

The reason there is a high demand for technicians in the medical field (people to read MRI's, Xrays, CAT's, etc) is because the state of proper medical technician/nursing schooling in this country is so underfunded that qualified people who WANT to do these things can't get the education and degrees they need to do these things.

Outsourcing IS NOT the answer.

The answer is to reinstate funding to schools that teach radiology, nuclear medicine, ultrasonography, nursing, etc, so that these schools can admit more than 30 students per year.

I'm a pre-nursing student now. Have a stellar GPA, but I'm facing the fact that I'm going to have to move to Bumfuck just to get my nursing degree because the school I go to now (a great community college) is so underfunded they only allow 90 nursing students into their program per year. The requirements to get into the program are requirements you would find in Law School, Med School, etc.

It's disgusting.

By the year 2010, there is expected to be ONE MILLION nursing posisions open JUST in the United States. That's just in the US, and that's JUST for nurses.

But America takes the 'high road' and imports nurses from South Africa, Philipines, etc--places that have much more urgent health crises than the US does, and places where their medical shortages are much more acute than the US. Esp. since S.A. has such a high # of people with AIDS, they need all the nurses they can get.

But the US woos them with salaries higher than they're making in SA, guarantees of citizenship, paying for relocation, etc.

All the while, there are people here in the US breaking their necks to get into nursing school, and we're turned away by the hundreds.

At my school, they have over 200 applicants PER QUARTER---they only allow 30 students PER QUARTER---and that's just ONE school of many in the state that offer RN programs.

It's disgusting and frustrating on so many levels.

On Edit:

I should add that the reason that radiologist, and other med. tech salaries are so high is because they have such a shortage. They HAVE to offer sky-high salaries for people to work there, because basically they're having to woo people from working at hospital A, B and C to work at Hosp. D.

I see this with nursing--every hospital has a better incentive package, better benefits, better wages, better hours than the next.

It's a competition to get people in there.

The salaries would be drastically reduced in the US if they could get people in to do the job---but as it is, people can't get in to do the job because they can't get into school to LEARN how to do the job.

So they're paying high wages for a reason.

No nurse would work 80 hrs a week for $7.15 an hour, and no radiologist would read 500 charts a day for $20k a year

[Noordam]

2. I hate to say it but Bush is looking to "fix" the nursing problem

by making nurses salary with no overtime. That is one of the big groups Bush's overtime cut back will hit.

If you make nurses salary with 50 hour work weeks, a lot of the shortage goes away.

[Heddi]

3. I don't know about that

I know many nurse who LOVE the OT pay they receive---adds TREMENDOUSLY to their year-end salary figures.

Most of them, w/o OT make $60k a year before taxes

HOWEVER, with OT, they make about $80k a year before taxes.

They can salary them all they want, but unless these nurses are making the same salary, they're going to leave.

Nursing has one of the highest burnout rates of any industry anyways. Most can't and don't work more than 15 or so years in the profession before they're just spent, and go working in other areas--usually NOT in health care.

So they can be salaried, and cut them down to 50 hours a week, but unless they are making the money they would have made for 40 hrs + 10hrs OT, they're going to leave.

And if the scant nurses we have NOW leave, that's only going to INCREASE the shortages of nurses, not make it go away.

There needs to be DRASTIC overhauls in the entire industry. THere's no one solution that's going to work.

Nurses are overworked, underpaid and greatly underappreciated. You get into it for the humanity, but humanity don't pay the bills. Humanity doesn't pick your kids up after school. Humanity doesn't make up for seeing your coworkers and ill patients more than you see your family. Humanity only goes so far, and I feel humanity is stretched thin these days.