When Sienna Salcedo isn’t working 12-hour shifts three times a week as a physician’s assistant at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, she’s flying down to West Palm Beach or Miami to host Botox parties.
Salcedo is part of a greater rash of nurse practitioners, registered nurses, and physician’s assistants who are leaving the hospital system — or bypassing it entirely — for the greener and more autonomous pastures of aesthetics.
This shifting workforce won’t come as a surprise to anyone working in or around the U.S. medical system in the past 50 years. Scholars have warned of a nursing shortage for decades, with many factors at play: A high patient-to-nurse ratio is just one of the many long-standing issues that nurses have faced — a concern that was only exacerbated by the pandemic.