Nurses and Doctors don’t want to work or live in Dickinson, North Dakota.  From the nurses and doctors that I have met in Dickinson, from them quickly leaving Dickinson after arriving here, from the many temporary agency nurses and doctors in Dickinson that are here to staff the medical facilities, from the temporary agency nurses and doctors that never come back, from the emergency medical flight crew members that refuse to come back to work in Dickinson, from the constantly recurring job advertisements for the same medical personnel for the same position at the same facility, I can see that nurses and doctors don’t want to work or live in Dickinson, North Dakota.

Everywhere in the United States, nurses and doctors are in demand.  They can pick where they want to go.  They asses what they will be paid versus the cost of living, what the medical facility is like, what the healthcare professionals are like, what their work environment will be, what is the character of the community, what can they do outside of work.  What is Dickinson, North Dakota like?

After spending many years in a difficult, demanding, and expensive course of study, nurses, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, physicians assistants, and medical doctors all want to have, and expect to have a good quality of life.  One of the most important things to them is to have a nice, appealing, comfortable place to live.  These professionals when they are young and have large student loans to pay off, are willing and able to pay up to $2,000 per month for an apartment when they first relocate to a new town for work.  Normally, this would allow them to have an apartment on the ocean, a river, a lake, or mountain, that was quiet and peaceful.  However in Dickinson, any young medical professional could spend half their income on an apartment and they would be living amongst dirty oil field workers, their dirty filthy trucks, and instead of peace and quiet, they would be listening to diesel trucks idling loudly outside their window.

The young medical professionals wanted and expected to have a good quality of life, they looked forward to going out to nice clubs and restaurants after work, going to the beach, hiking in the mountains, snow skiing, and meeting and socializing with new friends.  In Dickinson, everywhere you go the town is full of uneducated and ignorant oil field workers and local people.  The oil field workers were often obnoxiously rude, and the local people were unfriendly, not helpful, hostile, and hateful.  There are no nice clubs and restaurants in Dickinson because they allow the oil field workers in, there is no nice beach, no mountains to hike or ski on.

Many of the young medical professionals that came to Dickinson, quickly left after arriving here.  You would see a pamphlet, brochure, or press release about a new medical services professional joining an office, clinic, or facility, and in a few months they would be gone.  There were no nice places for them to live, there were no nice places for them to go outside of work, there were no professional peers their own age to meet and socialize with, there were no exciting, fun, or interesting activities, things to do, or places to go.  They could have gone and used methamphetamine and crack with the oil field workers.

Though there are a few older dentists and doctors in Dickinson that behave like medical professionals, many of the nurses and health care administrators in Dickinson are ignorant, backward, primitive, malicious, hostile, hateful local people with local educations.  These local nurses and local health care administrators in Dickinson are like fiends and psychopaths from movies, or like the Germans in WWII.

For the older nurses and older doctors that work for temporary agencies that come to Dickinson to fill the staff shortages at medical facilities, it is these local Dickinson nurses and local healthcare administrators that make them not ever come back.  They have not ever seen people in professional positions behave in such an ignorant, backward, primitive, malicious, and hostile manner.  They quickly see why there is a shortage of medical professionals in Dickinson.  For the young medical professionals, they leave Dickinson within a few months because work is so bad, and the town is so bad, even though they know having such a short tenure on their resume looks very bad.