Episode 9: Commission for Nurse Reimbursement

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, hey, nurses. Welcome to the Nurse Dot podcast. Giving nurses validation, resources and hope. One episode at a time. Oh. Today on Nurse Dot podcast.

Rebecca Love

We're sitting at a moment in time where whatever we decide about what's going to happen in nursing today is going to decide if our profession survives. We better reprioritize where we we value our health care workforce because things are in trouble right now.

Cara Lunsford

Joining us today, Rebecca Love, one of the most influential nurses of our time with her wealth of knowledge and passion for innovation. Rebecca has become an industry leader in advocating for the nursing profession. Her advocacy has led to important changes in health care, such as expanding patients access to care, and increasing the emphasis on how nurses play a key role in the health care system.

I'm your host, Kara Lunsford, registered nurse and VP of Community Ed Nurse AECOM. Oh, well, hello there, beautiful Rebecca. Love, thank you for joining the Nurses podcast host.

Rebecca Love

How have you been doing, by the way? I'm still going.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, my gosh, I've been good. I mean, it's been kind of a whirlwind.

Rebecca Love

How when when did you officially launch the podcast?

Cara Lunsford

So it was just this past October. So we did a whole season one. We had never done one. Basically, Nurse back home was like, We'd like you to host a podcast. And I was like, Okay.

Rebecca Love

I'm going to do it. I'm ready. I'm ready. And you're like, I didn't realize it was so much work and so confusing on how to do it.

Cara Lunsford

I know there are a lot of work and I'm very fortunate. I have my wife who is a sound engineer and does all the editing and the audio and she's an Emmy Award winning sound person. So, you know, who else would I have doing all the sound for this? Which is why it sounds so good and sounds so professional.

Rebecca Love

I love it, Kara. You know what? You always are very good at knowing where to put the focus on things, because that's where people constantly fall down, right? They come up with the idea, but it's not tying up the small details. And you are always really good with the small details and packaging things.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, well, thank you. I feel the same way about you. I'm a huge Rebecca Love fan. Everyone you know, they'll ask me like, Do you know Rebecca Love have your. I was like, Do I know Rebecca? Who doesn't know Rebecca love?

Rebecca Love

That's so nice of you to say to her. It's not easy. And you know this stuff, you know, And it feels like you take criticism from all angles and it doesn't matter what you try to do. And honestly, even this commission. So thank you for taking the time to talk about it because, man, I've had people even just come up to me and say, like, like, who do you think you are to take on this issue?

And I'm like, Well, who else? You know, I'm waiting for somebody else to do it. Please, I'll be happy to turn it over to somebody else if they feel like they can move the needle here. Right. So, you know, that pedigree and nursing, how you and I didn't walk that we did not walk that walk. And you know, we may talk the talk, but we didn't walk the walk.

So because of that, there are people that are going to criticize no matter what we do. So we're going to try to get through it.

Cara Lunsford

But you know what? Who cares? You know, like Brené Brown says, why would you listen to anybody who's in the cheap seats? Because, like, if you're not down there doing it, if you're not in the arena and being a warrior, being a voice for nurses and also having people throw stones at you, right? Because when you're up in the cheap seats, nobody's throwing stones at you.

Rebecca Love

That's a good point. Yeah, you're right. Now it's so true. Your catch me off about like a conversation. So don't worry about it. We're going to do great things. So tell me how you want to get this started. What's the plan for today.

Cara Lunsford

Harry? And kick this off your time and we're going to take this. Okay. So I took a look at what you sent me, and I had no idea that there was this commission for like, nurse reimbursement.

Rebecca Love

We just launched it. We just launched it like, okay.

Cara Lunsford

Well, good. So I'm glad I'm not totally out of the loop. I know. I was like, This is amazing. Where is this been? You know?

Rebecca Love

So yeah. So you're going to your first talks about this.

Cara Lunsford

Okay. Super excited to help get some ears on this and get people hyped about it because this is like a really, really important subject.

Rebecca Love

I think it's probably the most important subject for our profession of this time. I don't know about you care, but I feel like we're sitting at a moment in time where whatever we decide about what's going to happen in nursing today is going to decide what if our profession survives or if our profession basically sort of mitigates out to being the lowest cost denominator for every health care system, which means that most women in America, which is still it's still a female profession in the United States, will no longer choose nursing because there will be no there will be no investment into it.

There will be no career path for them. And the truth is, I think that we better reprioritize where we we value our health care workforce because things are in trouble right now. I've never seen it so good. And I'm sure you're seeing it too. Like I've never seen it so bad.

Cara Lunsford

Absolutely. And for sure, when there is a problem, you have to follow the money, right? You have to follow the money trail, because usually what is happening is that there is not and it's sad to say, okay, but it is true that if there is not money in it, then people don't care. If they cannot see like what is the return on this investment and what is that like?

You can be the most altruistic of hospitals or whatever, but at the end of the day, if it doesn't work out, if the math doesn't work out, that is not where people put their attention. Exactly. So let's talk about the history of nurse reimbursement. Talk about that for a second. All right.

Rebecca Love

So let me start you back in time almost over a hundred years ago, and you probably call in the early 1900s, women were fighting for the right to vote and nurses tended to stay out of that fight. They weren't behind 100% fighting for women's right to vote in this country until 1919, when the American nurses Union at the time organized what would be the largest march to support the women's suffrage movement in the history of the country.

So 1919 American Nurses Union finally gets behind the idea of women's right to vote. And in 1920, when the 19th Amendment is passed, women's right to vote happens. Women obtained the right to vote in this country. Now over the 1920s. By allowing women the right to vote, nursing quickly becomes the greatest economic vehicle for women's financial independence in the history of the world.

Nurses at that time all ran their own independent practices. They all had their own ability to hire clients bill for their services. And at that time hospitals were this place of deplorable conditions. Only the most destitute would seek care of their care, and heart surgery started to get developed into hospitals. Private families started to bring private duty nurses in to provide care in these hospitals.

Hospitals started to see that outcomes started to get better. They started to bring nurses in to the hospitals to start getting better outcomes for their patients. What they saw is that health care across the entire hospital system got better and what took place was at that time that bills would be issued, you would clearly see demarcated on all bills from hospitals in the 1920s a clear line that demarcated nursing services.

So nurses billed for their services in the 1920s. This was common practice. Now, as you can imagine, as nurses could build for their practices, hospitals run by men, doctors being men started to see economic competition by nurses to the hospital model. They started to feel women had too much power. According to the expert researcher Dr. Dare. She said hospitals wanted to keep nurses as far away from the money as possible.

So in the 1930s, when they started to invent national insurance to pay for health care, these doctors, these hospital administrators, men started to look for models which they could pay for nursing services, but not necessarily break them out as a billable service. They turned to hotels, though, and saw that maids were rolled into room rates and then they rolled nurses into room rates in the 1930s, forever hiding nursing from the value add in health care, placing a squarely as a cost and a question that I asked Bassett.

Health care, which has been on the front of my mind, is imagine we're nursing, but not only nursing. Where would women be today if 100 years ago they had not pulled it all the way from us? The greatest economic vehicle for women's financial independence in the history of the world, the profession of nursing. They pulled it all the way from us, made us squarely a cost to health care systems.

And still to this day, nursing is the only health care professional, the only one that is still a sore cost to hospital systems and why you're always going to hear more nurses equal, more cost, and therefore we're not going to staff any more nurses.

Cara Lunsford

Oh my gosh, thank you for providing that background. And I've said this before on other podcast episodes that I try to come into a lot of these interviews naive enough that I can a, be shocked by what I hear, but be be able to ask some of the questions that are coming up in my mind as I'm hearing you talk, because we've known for a long time.

Like obviously it's no big surprise that this being a female profession that we have dealt with a significant amount of oppression and abuse, I mean, over the year, but decades and decades and decades and hundreds of years. Okay. So that is not a big surprise to many of us. However, I did not realize that things that we had and that we were implementing were actually stripped away from us and that this has led to a big part of what we're facing today.

Because now I understand and I did kind of understand having a few conversations with some different people in the last season about how nursing is a cost and it's literally bundled into the cost of the room rate. And so, of course, unless you reform the system, there is never going to be a reason for the system or the hospitals or the facilities to want to incur more cost.

I mean, that's just a that's a no brainer.

Rebecca Love

Well, you're seeing this play out right now in Mayo in Minnesota, right? I mean, basically what happened in May was a bipartisan bill, got all the way up to the governor's desk, which would have allowed for nurse committees to form on staffing ratios within safe levels of patient care is designed within a hospital system. And Mayo basically stepped forward and said, if you pass this bill, we will pull billions of dollars from investment within the state of Minnesota unless we are allowed to be opted out of this.

And that's what happened yesterday. They were opted out of this. So the truth is, is until we fundamentally figure out the reimbursement model, every hospital system in the country is always going to fight against the ratios that would actually prevent would allow nurses to practice safely and stay by the bedside. And the truth is this. You're based in California, one of the only states that have nurse to patient ratios.

We know several things are true and facts about California. There is no nursing crisis in California. Two year outcomes are better in all those things. And you don't have a nursing shortage because because of mandating ratios, nurses actually will work in those states at very high levels because they feel safe to practice. And I think what we're looking at is this breaking point for our profession, where many nurses are saying in light of the criminal prosecutions of nurses that largely started since the criminal prosecution of done to March 2022, in which she was found guilty of a self reported medical error, she self-reported this.

We all have always thought, okay, we can lose our license. Malpractice insurance will cover that. I don't think any of us ever thought that if we were put in an unsafe environment, not given the right staff, not given equipment that was functioning correctly, that if a mistake happened, we could be held criminally responsible. But it is now happening to the point that even the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that if you follow a doctor's order and it results in harm to a patient, you can be held criminally responsible as a nurse.

The stakes are too high for nurses. The collective psyche of our profession is sitting there saying, I want to provide care. I love nursing. But the truth is this What you've done to us is you're staffing us to the lowest cost denominator in situations that are deeply unsafe. And because I can't do my job safely, I'm no longer going to practice.

And that showed out in the McKinsey study, one of three bedside nurses was saying they were leaving in 2021. We know 100,000 nurses left between 2020 and 2021. But the more scary thing is, is that the average length of experience on a 12 hour shift before the pandemic was six years of experience. We're now averaging 2.8 years of experience on a 12 hour shift within a three year time frame.

So where did all of the experienced nurses go? Kara And these younger ones, they have no idea. They have no idea that every day they step across that threshold, that if they make a mistake now, not only can they be prosecuted civilly, but they can be prosecuted criminally and have no life, and they may not be aware of that malpractice insurance, all that money we pay for malpractice insurance does not defend you when you're criminally prosecuted.

Cara Lunsford

No, it does not.

Rebecca Love

And this is the issue that I'm feeling about our profession. I know that. And, you know, now that we've sort of switched to the corporate side of health care, that if there is not money, if people can't figure out how to make money on something, they don't invest in it. And the truth is, nursing has always been a cost to health care systems.

As long as it remains a cost, we're not going to invest in it, value it or protect it. We're going to commit to nearly trying to cut the services, cannot cut the numbers in which we have, and we will continually take away what is perhaps the greatest profession in health care's lifeline. Because what we've always had was a belief that if we did the best that we could, we would be able to go on caring as a nurse.

And we're starting to see that that's not happening anymore.

Cara Lunsford

CARE It absolutely can't happen because suddenly to exactly to what you said is that the the risk that you're taking on so far outweighs any reward that you can possibly find in the profession. I mean, just think about it for a second. Imagine you have to you go to jail. You know, it's one thing to lose your livelihood, to lose your license.

And that's bad. That's that's bad. But the idea that you could be taken from your children, that you could have to go to jail because you made an error and the error was made because you didn't have safe working conditions. And who's going to roll that dice every day that we tell people all the time, you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, right?

We say it all the time. They say it to you in the airplane. Every single time you board an airplane, they tell you, put your own oxygen mask on first, Right? That is what these nurses are doing. And you say, like, why are we anticipating 800,000 nurses leaving or whatever it is? Right. Well, that's a big part of it.

A huge part of it. Okay. So now there's this incredible effort on your part to do reform. Okay. Insurance reform. Now you're talking about Medicare primarily.

Rebecca Love

So Medicare. So just I think educate nurses a little bit about this. You'll never get commercial insurance to take action with regard with without Medicare, making that action first. So Medicare is the largest payer, Medicare, Medicaid are the largest payers in the United States. Right. So they oversee the population over 65 for Medicare and Medicaid issues under anybody under the age of 65 who qualifies based on financial needs and assistance for for insurance purposes.

And so these this body sets the standards for reimbursement policies in the United States. So we set up the commission for nurse reimbursement to first address Medicare, knowing that they will be the ones who set the precedent for further changes that would be done by your larger commercial insurers. And now this. I think all of us for decades have been talking about the need for a reimbursement model for not for nursing.

Right. And so I waited a long time hoping somebody was going to do this. Right. Somebody smarter, better than I am, is going to go out there and solve this problem. And what happened is I was at one of the largest nursing conferences in the United States, and I was pulled aside by what we would sort of say are sort of the godmothers of nursing.

And I can't identify them, but they sat me down and they specifically said, Rebecca, none of our nursing organizations are going to get this right. They're not going to do it. They're not going to take on the American they're not going to take this on in a way. So we need you to found this commission. And I remember I was sitting there and I remember thinking to myself, well, this is this is a massive fight.

Right? This is this is not something that's going to drive change. They've been we've been trying for 40, 50 years in this country. We thought it when it first happened, when the nurses saw that this was happening in the 1920s, they definitely tried to oppose this model happening. And then they tried to get in the 1980s, the 2008.

And every time it's been shot down, they've brought it through. So I know that this is not something that we can do in a vacuum, that we can do it in vertical, but it's going to take all of us. And I also know this is not something that's going to be done in one or two years, but this is the next five years of my life.

And so the people that I went out to and approached my my co-chair, for example, Sharon Pierce, she's a C in A in North Carolina. She was the CEO and who effectively fought the American Medical Association's goal to roll back full practice authority for seniors in North Carolina. This is a woman who is a go getter and determined to fight for the practice of nursing and all my other commissioners fundamentally recognize that they are sitting at a time of momentous change, that some of them are on boards of hospitals, some of them are chief nursing executives of hospitals.

For example, the chief nursing executive, UCLA Hospital for Special Surgery CEO Brian Wine, Rick of Banner Health. They recognize that until we figure out a way to get nurses reimbursed, there will always be this misalignment on where we're going to show our dollars. Now care. I don't know if you're familiar with the study that came out of North Carolina by the Treasurer's office.

Powell regarding the nonprofit health care systems and the billions of dollars that have invested there, are you familiar with the study?

Cara Lunsford

No. Please familiarize me.

Rebecca Love

This is why I think it's so important. We're always told there's no money in health care, right? So what happened was several months ago, I suddenly novant health care system in North Carolina. Emergency room wait times for going up to 24 hours. Patients were dying in the E.R. They were shutting wards and laying off nurses because they said they couldn't afford nursing.

Right. So the state's treasurer office went in and pulled their Medicaid license and said, you know what? You're not meeting the obligations of a hospital to the community, which is we've given you billions of dollars. Where is this money going when you're saying you can't staff nurses? Now, as soon as that Medicaid license was pulled, suddenly they found all this money to rehire nurses and novant.

But it triggered the Treasurer's office to say, well, we've given $1.75 billion to nonprofit health care systems the last ten years to stay afloat. Where did that money go? And this study showed that all of that $1.7 billion of all the billions that they had given these health care systems, had gone to executive pay, c o pay at our nonprofit health care systems had doubled in the course of five years, whereas nursing pay had only increased 14% over a decade, 1.4% per year.

So the reason that this is a problem is that as long as nurses are rolled into room rates, all of those dollars that are going into health care systems for room rates are being allocated to anything but. And what the study showed was not probably surprising to me or you care, is that executive pay had little impact, in fact, no impact on patient outcomes or on the mission of the nonprofit hospital systems.

So all of the money that taxpayers had been giving to these health care systems, billions only went to executive pay. So when we say money doesn't matter, it absolutely does matter. And what they do not do with all of these dollars until we get to nurses as a reimbursable service code so that we can track where the dollars are going.

Fundamentally, we're never going to be able to correlate those dollars that are coming in to health care systems to support the nursing workforce. And this has now led to his breakthrough study, which you'll have to look it up, is now leading to other 19 other treasurer's offices to go and investigate Where is the money going in health care?

Where is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money going? Because we know one thing's for certain care, which is if there are not nurses in hospitals, there is no health care. And we saw this happen just what happened two weeks ago in the UK when 50% of the nursing workforce walked out of the NHS and their entire health care system went on life support.

The reality is there and everything else could be done. Outpatient or occupational therapy, physical therapy, surgery, all of that could be done outpatient. The whole reason that patients are in hospitals or in nursing homes today is their life is so at risk. That was out 24 seven monitoring by a nurse. They could die without nurses. There is no health care and somehow we have left nurses out of the financial model.

And because of it, it's not only destroying health care, it's destroying what I believe is the greatest profession that we have in health care today, which is nursing.

Cara Lunsford

So when I think about a hospital wanting more money, right, because technically if this works, that really there's potentially more money in it for the hospitals and there's more incentive for them to bring more nurses in because they can bill for those hours and for those services. So there's potentially more money on the line. Okay. So why do you think that it has taken so long for someone to advocate for this kind of thing here?

Rebecca Love

You know, you were in nursing school. We never talked about how nurses are billed for, I think, things like that. Nobody ever talked to us about the business of health care. Right. So I don't think a lot of us even knew this or understood this. It just seems it just doesn't make sense. Right. And then nobody else talked to anybody that was not nurses about this outside of the CFO office.

So I think those health care leaders that drive business decision had no idea that nurses were put as a cost structure to health care system and why there's this misalignment. Secondly, I think that there is a lot of speculation that would program that paid nursing services for theirs would drive up health care cost. And what we're saying is we don't believe so we're not looking to drive up and cost health care more.

What we're saying is reallocate the funds that are being given to health care systems accordingly to the profession that is driving the outcomes. And people keep saying to me, well, value based care is going to solve this. And, Kyra, the truth is value based care, it all depends on NPI numbers, national preventative provider identifiers. Nurses don't have an NPI number.

So even if we do value based care, there's no way to track it back to the nurse of all the delivery of care. You're tracking it back to the room. So fundamentally, we are at a crux moment of time that we must do these things. And why does nobody know about it? It was by a fluke. I was on the internet one day and researching something about the history of nursing and came across the article that John Whelton wrote, which turned me on to the entire history and then triggered me to buy all of these other books.

But in all honesty, Kyra, I heard an expert in the deep Web to go through files from the 1920s to make sure that what I told you was factually true, that really this was done intentionally to bury nursing, to bury the impact that women had on health care and forever undermined the presence of what we were doing as a profession.

And just simply for that reason, that we should be looking at righting the wrongs of history and what it did to women's economic development. Nursing is by far the Prime example to showcase that fight and also that directional change that we need to fundamentally change just even for that reason alone. But I think you know this, Karen, nobody wants to talk to us about money as nurses, which is one wrong.

We should all talk about money. And I'm tired of being told that just because I care for people doesn't mean I should be paid for it. And I would love somebody executive to tell me that it doesn't matter to them about the money because working in a in a health care business, I know that it's about one thing consistently and that is the bottom line.

And we we as nurses need to get to the bottom line of this. And that's why we put together this commission. And I appreciate you having us talk about this, because we need a collective of us to say it is time that we're reimbursed for the services nurses provide. Fundamentally, they do it for occupational therapy, MRI techs, every other profession duster, and simply we know it works for them.

We know what it is not working for nurses, so we know that we can make it work. If it works for every other health care professional, they should be working for nurses. So let's just level the playing field.

Cara Lunsford

Right? Absolutely. And so what can nurses do? Not just nurses, but what can the general public do? Because I have been talking about this. I'm like, this is not just a nurse problem. This is a public health emergency. I was like, if you are a person and you either have someone who is in the hospital today think that you may be in the hospital, which will likely happen at some point in your life.

This is impacting you, whether it be today or tomorrow or ten years from now, this is going to impact you. So I've even said to my family, I'm like, you know, the hospital is not somewhere you want to end up today because to what you said just a few minutes ago, that the average number of years of expertise that you're going to have in the hospital is somewhere around two and a half years.

Okay. So that is alarming and it should be alarming. And so not only how can nurses get involved to make sure that this reform happens, but how can the general public be involved as well?

Rebecca Love

Well, one, please go to the the commission for nurse reimbursement dot com. We have a platform sign up, get our newsletters, get involved for assigning nurses across every state, across every federal level, across committees to make this happen as one of them. But to the truth is, is I would be asking the general public to be asking where is the money going?

Follow that trail, reaching out to their treasurer's offices when they are saying, you know, my emergency room wait time is 19 to 20 hours. There's nobody there to see me. We're giving all of this taxpayer dollars to these nonprofit health care systems. Who where is that money going? Because we know that if you pay for more nurses, we can actually drive care through the hospital.

Right? When there's not enough nurses, patients can't get into hospitals, patients can't move up the ladder. There are actually plenty of physicians in hospitals there. If there's not a shortage of physicians and any hospitals, rural areas have problems with specialties, but access to care is always available through physician based services. But it's not when we don't have nurses in there.

So fundamentally, I think the question needs to happen and also that the boards of these hospitals who have fiduciary responsibility need to be asking what are your outcomes? What are the amount of nurses that we have, What are your amount of vacancies? What are we paying our executives? What is their bonus structure? And is that the right allocation of dollars?

Because I think there is this belief, and what I've heard from people in business is, you know, we needed to pay CEOs of hospitals $9 million, but, you know, 100% bonus to get the right kind of quality to lead this hospital system. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a nonprofit world. Like I'm sure that we could find some really good individuals for $500,000 a year who would love to run a hospital system, who would be very competent in doing so.

And I mean, I know what you're seeing next year, raising our eyebrows at $20,000. It just seems outrageous. Yes. But when you're comparing that to salaries of anywhere between, you know, 2 million to 13 million to run a hospital system plus additional board positions and money that they're making on the side, the reality is something is fundamentally gone wrong.

So you, as a consumer of health care, as a taxpayer that supports all these nonprofit health care systems, should be putting pressure on your state treasurer's offices, calling in the attorney general of the systems and saying, I have had wait times of 19 hours. This is wrong. I don't have access to care. Why is there not more nurses in these hospitals?

And more importantly, it's time that they start coming out the public and saying that they support nurses. We all had the applause, things like this. But the truth is, is that we need to say, as the general public, develop an economic model that sustains this profession. Correct. The wrongs of history and together, maybe instead of having all of our next generation choose that they want to be influencers on Tik-Tok, maybe we can start influencing the way the consumer and the public sees nurses and hope that the next generation chooses to become nurses because care.

Right now, nursing is still the largest profession in the United States. It's the largest profession still for women in the United States. Could you imagine where would the world be, where all society be if we don't have nurses in it? It's like nurses and teachers are the people who show up for other people consistently in their lives at the expense to themselves.

I just wonder what will our society become if we lose that fabric? The humanity it takes to always put somebody else before our own needs. And I think I think nursing is one of those professions that are a gauge of our humanity and our humility in the world. And we need them. And we're not keeping up. We're not keeping and sustaining the workforce.

And we need to because to your point earlier, that only will one day. We all need access to care. But more importantly, in all of our communities, we need access to that humanity.

Cara Lunsford

Well, isn't that a mic drop if I ever heard one? My goodness, girl. Jeez. I mean, I've heard you speak before, and I've always been taken aback by just your ability. You have a beautiful way with words. And and I think one of your biggest strengths is your ability to communicate and really lead people and lead a movement.

You did it with San Seattle. I've seen you do it many times. No matter where you are. You're just this like, incredible, incredible speaker, leader, motivator. I'm really hoping that this what you just said is like a TED talk very soon. You've already done a TED talk, but this is you need to talk about this because it is something that is relevant to everybody.

And you said it so perfectly, I couldn't have said it any better. And I just really, really hope that everyone who is listening to this today, whether you're in the health care profession, thinking about going into the health care profession, thinking about being a nurse, you've already or you've been a nurse or you've been a nurse for decades, that you have heard these words, You understand what one of the problems is, one of the major problems, because I think that sometimes we don't understand what has happened.

And if you don't know what has happened, if you don't have the historical references that you just were able to bring into this interview, then you feel very disempowered and you don't feel like you have the ability to affect change because you don't know where to start. So I just think that this is such an incredible movement. You always have my buy in.

Rebecca Love

This is going be the fight of our careers. It may cost me my career. It is what it is, right? But to me it's the biggest fight of our profession. If we don't get this right, everything else is Band-Aids on Gorges in nursing without a reimbursement model. Everything else we try to do build up more resiliency, give another meditation app to nurses.

The reality is that none of that is going to matter because the truth is, is we're going to keep putting nurses in environments that fail them as a profession and then going to be criminally prosecuted, and then the next generation isn't going to pick nursing and then we're going to sit there and wonder why they're all of our hospitals sit vacant because there's no one left to provide the care.

And we're at that point. At that point. But you see, it. I know all of us see it. I feel like I'm screaming into this abyss about this and wondering if anybody is going to hear us.

Cara Lunsford

And maybe they won't, you know, And in some ways, like maybe they won't. And then I wonder if this is where you see, I talked to April, who she's the president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and I interviewed her. And I just wonder if what we're going to see is we're going to go back in time to where it was.

Nurse led Nurse founded that brick and mortar clinics and places that people can go and get that kind of care and that nurse practitioners will be leading the charge and that they will be hiring nurses and they will be standing up hospitals. And I think that that is what is probably on the horizon because I think that we are slow to act in so many ways.

I mean, we see that, right? Like it's just we're so slow to act. And I do think that when you are slow to act, other things just eclipse it. You know, the nurse practitioners are going to eclipse.

Rebecca Love

Their they are the ones going into primary care. Let's be very honest, the next generation of physicians are not there's no money in it for them. And if we want access to care, we know that nurse practitioners deliver. And I agree with you 100%. And I think to your point, what is all this going to become new again?

Because we always knew that nurses knew it best, right? And people then took ownership of those great ideas and they took the power away from the nurses. And then when they became so blinded by what they were, they became so blinded by the financial model that they forgot parts of the mission. Then we're going to find that all this collapses and the only people left to pick it up and rebuild it again will be the nurses who understood that model from the very heart of it.

So like, let's be very honest, it was nurses who opened up the hospitals alongside the nuns in this country, and it was the nurses who saved hospital systems from failing in the 1920s. And I think in all honesty, as everything else starts to collapse, To your point, what's old is new again in the person that they're going to need to build all back up.

It's going to be one workforce. It's going to be nursing.

Cara Lunsford

If I was a hospital exac, I would be rallying around what you're doing because if they don't, if they don't support what you're doing and don't go to bat, they will be the old.

Rebecca Love

That is the final word. Cara Yes, Thank you and I appreciate that.

Cara Lunsford

I might drop. We've we've all had our mic drop moment, but I just want to say thank you so much for you taking the time to be with me on this episode for bringing this episode like the the topic of this episode to us, because I was like, okay, I want to talk to Rebecca, Love. I'll talk to your about anything, you know, Doesn't matter.

But you were the one that brought this topic. And when I saw it, I was like, Yeah, I was like, Yeah, we're going to talk about that.

Rebecca Love

Anything you do. I am a big proponent of and I think this is something that if other nurses are listening, the truth is we as a profession have not fundamentally always believed that a rising tide raises all boats. And the one thing we can do as a profession is to always support any other nurse who reaches out. So I am always here for you as well.

And thank you for reaching out to me because you've done it. You've done what very few have done, which is you exited your company to join a bigger company and because of it you're starting see voices of nursing heard in places that we otherwise were absent. So that is an accomplishment. And every other nurse who's listening here, please champion it forward because we need more of this happening across in.

Cara Lunsford

Thank you so much, Rebecca. I love you.

Rebecca Love

Let me take care of.

Cara Lunsford

I let you go and do all the great things that you do in the world. And I will catch up with you again soon.

Rebecca Love

Looking forward to it.

Cara Lunsford

Na chow. Bye, love. If you are a nurse who enjoyed this episode and you have an idea for future episodes, you can connect with me by downloading the nurse dot com app. Nurse dot is a nurse dot com original podcast series Production music and sound editing by Dawn Lunsford, Production Coordination by Rhea Wade, Additional editing by John Wells.

Thank you to all the listeners for tuning in to the Nurse Dot podcast. Until next time, keep spreading the love and the care.