Prior to now few months, nurses throughout the nation have been happening strike (or threatening to) as a measure of final resort to handle harmful understaffing at hospitals. Two key examples of this got here on Thursday.
The primary was the tip of a three-day nurses strike in New York Metropolis, which got here after a union representing about 7,000 nurses reached tentative contract agreements to enhance staffing ranges at Mount Sinai Medical Middle and Montefiore Medical Middle.
The second was a rally at a HCA Healthcare-owned hospital West Hills, California. Staff traveled from a number of states to attract consideration to the dire staffing ranges on the well being system’s greater than 150 hospitals throughout 19 states. The aim of the rally was to point out HCA that its employees understand how worthwhile the corporate is and that they gained’t be capable to tolerate their working circumstances for for much longer.
If HCA doesn’t display that it’s taking motion to handle its employees’ considerations after the rally, employees are prone to go on strike, Rosanna Mendez, the chief director of a nurses union linked to the rally, advised MedCity Information.
To grasp extra concerning the latest wave of nurse strikes, I spoke to Theresa Brown, a nurse and New York Occasions bestselling writer who typically writes about nurses’ underappreciated position within the U.S. healthcare system.
“I’ve by no means met a nurse who fortunately embraces putting — individuals don’t simply like to strike. A nurse who strikes does that out of a way of necessity,” she mentioned.
Nurses strike solely after they imagine it’s the solely possibility left to guard sufferers and ship high quality care. This happens after hospital administration fails to adequately reply to repeated requests to handle staffing considerations, Brown identified.
Understaffing clearly causes burnout and harms nurses’ psychological well being and wellbeing, however these issues aren’t actually what drives nurses to go on strike, she mentioned. It’s the well-researched incontrovertible fact that understaffing has a harmful and generally deadly impact on affected person care.
When nurses are assigned extra sufferers than they’ll deal with, sufferers die who wouldn’t have in any other case, Brown identified, including that this reality has been verified by a number of tutorial research. Sufferers additionally are inclined to endure extra opposed occasions, corresponding to urinary tract infections and central line infections, when items are understaffed, she mentioned.
“That sounds very dramatic, and I believe it’s exhausting for individuals to grasp precisely how that might be. They may suppose that each one nurses are doing is working round giving medicines and emptying bedpans, however that’s a misunderstanding of the job. The nurse is the canary within the coal mine for each affected person,” Brown declared.
Nurses are unable to maintain a detailed eye on sufferers after they’re overworked. That is problematic as a result of most people who find themselves within the hospital are fairly sick. As Brown put it, hospitals “attempt to eliminate individuals as rapidly as attainable,” so the sufferers who’re occupying rooms are sometimes in an acute situation that might take a flip for the more severe at any second.
Hospitals want sufficient staffing ranges in order that nurses will be there to examine in on their sufferers and spot when one thing goes improper — which is unattainable if a nurse is juggling a dozen sufferers. Brown thinks hospitals are failing to acknowledge how very important that is.
“I believe there’s not an appreciation of the significance of staffing — which is at this level simply willful blindness. The info is on the market. It’s very clear. And sadly, we’ve seen this unimaginable focus over the previous 20 years on having healthcare techniques be like some other enterprise — with an excessive concentrate on profitability,” she mentioned.
When nurses discuss to their employers about understaffing and its destructive impression on affected person care, they’re typically advised that funds constraints are stopping the hospital from addressing the problem, Brown identified. This places nurses in an extremely powerful psychological and emotional place — they see that their sufferers aren’t getting high quality care, however they’ve been advised that there’s no technique to repair it.
That is what causes nurses to go on strike — they really feel like it’s the solely technique to get their employer to take motion, Brown mentioned.
“My hat is off to the strikers, and my coronary heart goes out to them as a result of it will need to have been extremely exhausting to do what they’re doing. They’d solely do it as a result of they thought it was the final resort choice to get sufferers the care they want. Nurses aren’t within the job for the cash or the glory — they do it as a result of they’re dedicated they usually care,” she mentioned.
Picture: FilippoBacci, Getty Pictures
