Local nurses protest increased patient ratios
This is the third time in two months Watsonville nurses have gathered
WATSONVILLE >> For the third time in two months, Watsonville Community Hospital nurses are asking their administrators to reject the use of a staffing waiver they say jeopardizes the care of patients and the health of nurses.
At 2 p.m., nurses hosted a press conference and stood at the front entrance of the hospital — a first for the coalition, which has previously made no official statements at their demonstrations and stayed off the hospital property. Despite flash flood warnings, registered nurses Roseann Farris, Quiché Rubalcava and Annabelle Covington said they’d be ready with umbrellas to discuss putting patients first.
“Nurses have been able to the best (with what we have) but when we can’t get the things that we need that causes us to not put the patients first, to put them in danger,” Covington said. “It puts nurses at risk as well. All we want is for (management) to recognize this.”
Halsen Healthcare CEO Sean Fowler confirmed at the time of
the second protest in late December that the hospital had considered and ultimately contacted the California Department of Public Health about obtaining a nurse-to-patient waiver. The waiver eases staffing laws to allow the hospital to assign more patients per nurse in each department, and nurses like Linda Kerr feel it to be a recipe for disaster.
“The RNs need to maintain our safe nurse-to-patient ratios,” Kerr said. “Our hospital will not state that this will occur.”
Farris said that ratios have been changed to add more patients to a single nurse’s load intermittently throughout the pandemic.
“I’ve seen it a lot in emergency rooms when they’re holding patients,” Farris said just minutes before the press conference. “It really should be a 1:2 ratio and they (should) still have their complete team, patients are just as sick and needing attention in the E.R. as they would be in critical care so when (the hospital) doesn’t have that staffing to accommodate and staff appropriately, that’s very concerning.”
Watsonville Community Hospital had commented before press time regarding Wednesday’s planned demonstration. However, an email sent to hospital staff last week by the interim hospital board directors indicates that Halsen Healthcare’s leadership has been removed from the hospital and replaced with Prospect Medical Holdings — a corporation that runs 17 hospitals and 162 outpatient clinics in California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, according to its webpage.
The email, originally reported by The Pajaronian, stated that Halsen failed to fulfill its financial obligation to multiple stakeholders. Nurses are asking that the new management make the decision to negate the last action of the old management and rescind the staffing waiver.
The main ask, as communicated by California Nurses Association organizers since the first protest, is safe staffing even during a health crisis. On this national day of action, nurses will speak about their experiences in trying to maintain a high quality of care for patients while juggling more patients at once. Farris said that supplied registered nurses have been secured for the time being, but alternatives available for administrators to take to support nurses would be to retain those extra nurses until they’re not needed anymore and to continue the use of traveling nurses.
Farris stated in a prepared California Nurses Association statement released Tuesday that staff lacks personal protective equipment (PPE) and continually faces a management structure willing to cut corners. She told the Sentinel that the amount of PPE available depends on the day of the week. It’s been an uphill battle to secure consistent shipments from vendors.
The statement includes allegations that nurses have been retaliated against in their workplace for being vocal about the nurse-to-patient waiver issue.
“There shouldn’t be situations where we are being told that we could get in trouble if we didn’t work more than we can based on how tired we are,” Farris said, referencing recent forced mandatory overtime. “Nurses work their shifts and know if they are in the condition to work extra… (It’s) not abandoning your patients if you don’t work a double shift. utilizing that as a threat is what we were talking about.”
Rubalcava said the bond between the city of Watsonville, Watsonville Community
Hospital patients, staff and community members is a strong one that has been enshrined in two resolutions from the Watsonville City Council now — one approved in 2016 and one approved last week as parts of the city faced outages during the windstorm.
“In the last four-anda-half years, we have had three owners,” Rubalcava said. “Safe staffing saves lives, it’s proven… a landmark (for) the public health system. (City representatives) see that we cannot decline from that standard. COVID patients really merit and deserve closer attention… those ratios are essential for us to get through the pandemic.”
Generally, nurses hope that the interim directors will prioritize patients over profit.
“The fact of the matter is that COVID-19 literally unmasked the for-profit healthcare industry for its true motives: their monetary bottom line,” Rubalcava in the California Nurses Association statement. “While CEOs and other executives pad their pockets, nurses watch our patients suffer, watch our community face loss of life and home and health, and sadly, watch helplessly as our colleagues across the country needlessly die because of intentional decisions that leave nurses understaffed, under-protected, and under-prepared.”