The present day health care staffing crisis is of our own making; and years in the profit making department. There are limited coverups as nurses present the injuries and patient deaths.
Intense, sad, infuriating and powerful. This video by The New York Times features two MNA nurses as it exposes the hospital industry’s longstanding practice of understaffing nurses to drive profits at the expense of patient safety.
MNA local leaders Marlena Pellegrino, RN at St. Vincent Hospital, and Kerry Noonan, RN at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are featured prominently in the video, which advocates for safe patient limits within hospitals and at the legislative level.
This NY Times video reveals the truth: The current staffing crisis was created by the hospital industry, which has spent tens of millions on misinformation campaigns over the years to thwart efforts to ensure safer RN staffing and patient care in Massachusetts and beyond.
From the NY Times Opinion staff:
We’re entering our third year of Covid, and America’s nurses — who we celebrated as heroes during the early days of lockdown — are now leaving the bedside. The pandemic arrived with many people having great hope for reform on many fronts, including the nursing industry, but much of that optimism seems to have faded.
In the Opinion Video above, nurses set the record straight about the root cause of the nursing crisis: chronic understaffing by profit-driven hospitals that predates the pandemic. “I could no longer work in critical care under the conditions I was being forced to work under with poor staffing,” explains one nurse, “and that’s when I left.” They also tear down the common misconception that there’s a shortage of nurses. In fact, there are more qualified nurses today in America than ever before.
To keep patients safe and protect our health care workers, lawmakers could regulate nurse-patient ratios, which California put in place in 2004, with positive results. Similar legislation was proposed and defeated in Massachusetts several years ago (with help from a $25 million “no” campaign funded by the hospital lobby), but it is currently on the table in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These laws could save patient lives and create a more just work environment for a vulnerable generation of nurses, the ones we pledged to honor and protect at the start of the pandemic.
I do remember the prepandemic discipline actions of AZBN against many good nurses whose monster and immoral approach to monitoring gave clear views of a major contributing factor to nurses exoduses.
Nurse Watchdogs of Arizona 