Becker's ASC Review

96 HEALTHCARE NEWS 96 Rudeness is on the rise — why? By Molly Gamble I t's not just you, and it's not just in healthcare: Poor behavior ranging from the impolite to the violent is having a moment in society right now. e Atlantic's Olga Khazan spoke with more than a dozen experts on crime, psychology and social norms to suss out contributing factors to the spike in poor behavior, which she details in her piece, "Why People Are Acting So Weird," published March 30. Stress is one likely explanation for the bad behavior. Keith Humphreys, PhD, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told Ms. Khazan the pandemic has created a lot of "high-stress, low-reward" situations, in which someone who has experienced a lot of loss due to the pandemic may be pushed over the edge by an inoffensive request. Not only are people encountering more provocations — like staff shortages or mask mandates — but their mood is worse when provoked. "Americans don't really like each other very much right now," Ryan Martin, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who studies expressions of anger, told Ms. Khazan. It doesn't help that rudeness can be contagious. At work, people can spread negative emotions to colleagues, bosses and clients regardless of whether those people were the source of the negativity. "People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else," Christine Porath, PhD, a business professor at Georgetown University, said in the report. Just as the pandemic has reaped high-stress, low-reward moments, it has brought on a level of isolation that has affected how people behave. "We're more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened," Robert Sampson, PhD, a Harvard sociologist, told Ms. Khazan. "When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public." Richard Rosenfeld, PhD, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, went one step further to describe society operating with "a generalized sense that the rules simply don't apply." Ms. Khazan makes a point to distinguish mental health in the broader conversation about poor behavior. "People with severe mental illness are only a tiny percentage of the population, and past research shows that they commit only 3 to 5 percent of violent acts, so they couldn't possibly be responsible for the huge surge in misbehavior," she said. For a quantified look at how problematic behavior — including crime, dangerous driving, unruly passenger incidents and student disciplinary problems — has spiked, turn to journalist Matthew Yglesias' deep dive, born from his observation that "the extent to which we seem to be living through a pretty broad rise in aggressive and antisocial behavior" is underdiscussed. n Travel nursing by the numbers: 9 stats By Patsy Newitt A SCs are struggling to recruit and retain nurses, in part because of skyrocketing travel nurse pay — creating what some administrators call a "wage war." Here are nine key stats on travel nurses: 1. Travel nurses receive an average hourly rate of $120 an hour, accord- ing to the "2021 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report." 2. The RN vacancy rate in 2021 was almost a full percentage point high- er than 2020 at 9.9 percent, and 62 percent of hospitals have an RN vacancy rate of higher than 7.5 per- cent, brought on by the economy and COVID-19, according to the staffing report. 3. Vivian Health, a healthcare recruit- ing firm, saw record-breaking de- mand for travel nurses in September 2021, a 68 percent higher demand than September 2020. 4. Vivian Health also saw all-time high average pay for travel nurse contracts in September 2021 at $3,110 per week, up 39.4 percent from September 2020. 5. Pittsburgh-based UPMC paid an estimated $85 an hour for a travel- ing nurse or a nurse from an agency before the pandemic. This year, the health system is facing rates be- tween $225 and $250 an hour. 6. Travel nurses made on average $1,673 per week pre-pandemic. Now, they can get more than $4,000 per week in some cases, according to a report from Sumner College. 7. Hospitals in the Southeast had the highest RN turnover rate at 24.9 percent, a 7.2 percentage point in- crease from 2019. The Northeast had the lowest turnover rate of 13.2 percent, a 0.6 percentage point de- crease from 2019. 8. The median annual wage for reg- istered nurses was $75,330 in May 2020, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The low- est 10 percent earned less than $53,410, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $116,230. 9. Hospitals with 200 to 349 beds had the highest RN turnover rate of 22.9 percent in September 2021, a 5.8 percentage point increase from 2019, according to a report from the New Jersey Nurses Association. n

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