Hey all,
I’m an ICU nurse in the US who also happens to tinker around, and some time ago learned python to a moderate level. You wouldn’t really know this unless you were part of the medical field, but our profession is undergoing some radical changes for the worse, brought on by hospitals cutting every possible resource they can away from medical staff to maintain the profit bases they need. It’s kinda been the stereotype to hear that CEO’s continue to make big bonuses while workers suffer, but what if those workers were the ones directly responsible for titrating your lifesaving drips, or operating your ventilator?
I worked the COVID ICU and got to see firsthand how separate management is from the bedside experience, and as such realized that nurses, compared to many other professional careers, have almost zero information about jobs. Hospitals don’t share pay data unless it’s at the final interview. There aren’t sites that exist which let nurses write reviews, share pay data, compare cost of living data.
Because of this lack of data, hospitals who consistently ignore staff issues can still rely on hiring new graduates by the hordes to replace the browbeaten staff they’ve essentially abused for years. No one will build a tool like this because hospitals are the ones that pay for advertising on job boards, so the incentive is to always submit to hospital demands.
This is why I appreciate Anvil so much. The overhead to run a site that can serve my friends and colleagues is very low and accessible, and I know just enough python to build a CRUD app that really can start to change the face of nursing information. I wanted to share this with you because I think that large corporations and businesses are going to have their lunches eaten by smaller makers like me who are in the trenches with the people who need the tools. It would be a big risk financially to build this site for a corp, but for me it was just a few months of side-work.
The site is at safern.anvil.app and you can see some actual data entered if you look for hospitals in North Carolina under the city Chapel Hill. There are many planned features such as state rankings in pay and experience, but this MVP shows off the basic CRUD features. Will be going public soon to a large nursing forum to see what members have to say, but running a few final stability tests to ensure a mostly decent and bug free experience. The pay data requires an account, but if you are interested, its a plotly express scatterplot that is generated every hour off of new flagged data and stored as JSON in data tables to speed up the loading process. Got that solution off the forums
Special thanks to forum members who have helped me fix a few newbie problems, and stucork for responding to my hashrouting questions.
Wow, the homepage looks great! Did you make the graphic art yourself?
One issue I noticed was that when I hover over a side menu button, the disappears into the highlight-background. (I’m red-green colorblind, so that could be part or all of the issue.)
First I would like to second how clean the site is and what a great mission to have!
As for as the visibility issue, I think it’s because the icons are really dark and so is the highlight-background. Maybe changing the highlight-foreground to a lighter color would help.
The text does disappear I fixed it! It was using the dark overlay for some reason rather than the light. Thanks for the feedback.
And the graphics were pulled from a stock site. I would normally do my own graphic design but I’m not entirely sure how everything is going to settle in terms of features and whatnot so figured until I was certain, I wouldn’t waste time on hand drawing everything.
I’ll agree with it looking really nice and professional. I also fully support the purpose behind it.
I just showed it to my wife and explained the purpose behind it. She is a licensed X-Ray tech who until last year worked in one of our local hospitals as a cardiac cath lab tech. She has left the medical field behind because of the horrendous hours and general shittiness of management/administration. She is now working on her masters in social work, aiming to get her LCSW and begin private practice counseling, while working as a counselor at a non-profit that works with DCFS cases.
Her responses was pretty much what I expected. She LOVES the idea, however she wishes it was expanded to cover all clinic staff rather than just nurses. All of the various techs suffer in the same boat as the nurses. So, maybe think about expanding the idea?
Anyway, keep up the great work. I hope your site is able to cause some change for the better.
I’d honestly love to expand it to essentially every role. The plan was to get the framework built to nursing (because thats what I have in depth knowledge of) and then use that framework to expand to CNA’s as well. The difficulty is that most people seem pretty burned out and disinterested that I talk to so it’s really been just me on the project. Im hoping to eventually find a group of people that are interested in tackling the proj, but I think it’ll take a pretty nice proof of concept before people really get it.
