Yuma Regional ICU nurse speaks out after resigning
Exactly one month after Dr. Cleavon Gilman was asked not to return to work in the ER at Yuma Regional Medical Center, Corrigan Wright, an ICU nurse, worked her last shift at the hospital.
Except this time, the departure was on her terms.
“There were a lot of things management did that were shocking,” Wright, 35, told The Arizona Republic. “How they were treating nurses and frontline staff was bad — really bad. As we were treating patients and trying to combat the virus, we were noticing trends. We were bringing those trends up to management and it fell on deaf ears.”
The main trend that struck Wright stemmed from the COVID-19 outbreak at the Arizona State Prison Complex in
Yuma where more than 1,400 inmates have tested positive, the largest prison outbreak in the state system.
In addition, more than 1,500 employees have self-reported contracting the virus since the pandemic began in March and employees at the Yuma prison have said they believe most of the staff had been infected. No official numbers are publicly available.
As inmates were coming into Yuma Regional for treatment, their accompanying prison guards joined them — without proper masks, Wright said.
“It was always just a fabric mask you can get at any store or a surgical mask,” she said. “They needed N95s to be protected in an ICU full of COVID-positive patients.”
Wright tried to provide the guards with N95 masks herself, but she said the hospital restricted access to them. Employees have to pick up masks from charge nurses or an RN who is in charge of a ward in the hospital or other healthcare facility during their shift.
“When I asked the charge nurses for one for them, they told me they couldn’t have them and had to get their own supply,” Wright said.
In a statement sent to The Arizona Republic, Machele Headington, a spokesperson for Yuma Regional Medical Center, said if an “officer is witnessed not wearing appropriate PPE, we notify the warden and the issue is corrected.”
“To our knowledge there have been no further incidents of inappropriate PPE after notification to the warden,” Headington said. “We appreciate the DOC’s continued efforts to ensure the safety of assigned officers, our patients, and YRMC staff who they may contact during their time here.”
While Wright said she was enraged by what she saw as a “lack of action,” she kept to herself and continued to “warn and educate” the prison guards about their likelihood of contracting COVID-19 while in the ICU.
“(The guards) would tell me that they can’t complain because if we complain, it puts a target on our backs,” Wright said. “They were told the rooms in the hospital were negative pressure rooms and that their standard fabric or surgical masks would be enough to protect them.”
Judy Keane, a spokesperson with the Arizona Department of Corrections, denied this claim and said “N95 Masks, eye protection, gloves, and gowns have been issued to all staff involved in inmate transportation, in providing inmate security while at hospitals, and when assigned to areas where COVID-positive or symptomatic inmates are assigned.
“The expectation is for staff to wear appropriate PPE in these situations,” Keane said.
The email that started it all
On October 22, another ICU nurse at Yuma Regional started an email thread with Wright, as well as select management, to express their own concerns about staffing levels, increased workload and pay. Wright said she saw the thread as a “good opportunity” to put the prison guards’ circumstances “on blast.”
“I knew they all knew about it and nobody did anything for so long,” she said.
In Wright’s email sent on Oct. 26, she numbered seven “personal thoughts.”
The seventh thought: “Start implementing common sense policies that do not allow for ignorance of lay persons to spread the coronavirus. That includes correctional officers, border patrol, family members, etc. There are two guards here right now, sitting inside a non-negative pressure room with a positive patient.
“Neither of the two officers are wearing an N95 mask, or even have access to one. Yet, here they are spending 14+ hours a day within arms reach of a COVID (positive) person, in our hospital, right in front of us. This is unacceptable.”
While the other nurses who sent emails in the thread received a written response from Deborah Aders, vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at Yuma Regional Medical Center, Wright did not. Instead, she was asked by her interim manager to stay after work.
“She called me into the office and basically told me to shut my mouth,” Wright said.
Wright was told the email “went all the way up” and that the concerns reached the Yuma prison’s warden, Edwin Jensen, and he was “upset” she would imply he wasn’t providing his staff with appropriate PPE. Wright has not been told how the content of her email got to Jensen.
However, Warden Jensen died on Dec. 18 after being admitted to Yuma Regional that weekend. The Yuma County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed Jensen’s death but said it would not be determining the cause of death or making a report due to federal privacy rules.
‘They would do that to anyone’
On Dec. 9, Wright wrote a one-sentence email to her manager informing the hospital she was putting in her twoweeks notice. However, after the news of Gilman’s firing on Dec. 10, Wright said she wasn’t sure she could stick it out that long.
Gilman was asked not to return to work at Yuma Regional on Nov. 23. It started on Nov. 22 when Gilman tweeted “Just got to work and was notified there are no more ICU beds in the state of Arizona.”
“What happened to the 175 beds??? We likely don’t have nursing to staff them,” he added. The Arizona Department of Health Services at the time reported that 90% of ICU beds were in use.
The next morning, Nov. 23, Gilman had just arrived at the hospital when he received a call from the health care staffing company he works for, Envision Healthcare. Envision told him the hospital did not want him to come back to work.
“They told me it was because of the tweets and I couldn’t believe it because that was accurate information I posted to inform the citizens of Arizona,” he told The Arizona Republic. “It is a grave injustice and it’s not just happening to me. Doctors everywhere are afraid to speak up.”
The hospital released a statement on Twitter calling the situation “a misunderstanding.”
“I texted my manager that I was so upset by what I just read about Dr. Gilman that I felt like I could not even complete my two weeks notice,” she said. “It was so disgusting what they did, but I wasn’t surprised. They would do that to anyone.”
Wright worked her last shift on Dec. 23 and said six ICU night-shift nurses left after she did.
“That’s honestly more terrifying than the (COVID) numbers because they are having nurses that do not know how to care for a patient that’s intubated and paralyzed,” she said. “They are travel nurses, people not from the area and they don’t even have enough. I really don’t know what they are going to do. They need dozens to fill the holes that have been created.”
Wright has since started a new job at El Centro Regional Medical Center in California.
Other issues resurface
Wright, who specializes in acute heart failure, has been an ICU nurse for over 10 years. She moved her family from the East Coast to work at Yuma Regional three years ago.
“It has gone against the grain of everything I have experienced in my career of how hospitals treat their staff,” she said. “In their response to a global pandemic, I really thought the hospital I worked for and moved out here for would care enough about me and my life and that did not happen.”
Although the response to her email was the last straw, Wright said the frustration has been building since the pandemic began. Wright recalled management telling nurses who had masks on to take them off because they were “inciting fear in patients.”
“That automatically sends the wrong message to the community. It should have been a proactive one,” she said.
Once masks were encouraged nationwide, Wright said hospital employees were told to recycle their masks, whether that meant “using someone else’s or reusing their own over and over.” Wright said when concerns about the hospital’s handling of the virus were brought up to management, they were told to write their concerns and questions on a whiteboard in the ICU lounge.
“It really felt unsafe,” she said. “It was so hurtful. It’s negligent and it feels wrong.”
In the statement, Headington said as the pandemic has evolved, their team has “closely monitored critical PPE supply and followed CDC recommended strategies to conserve stock.”
“As the guidelines have evolved, we have adapted our processes to the new guidelines. With shortages of N95 masks across the world, YRMC implemented CDC recommended contingency and crisis capacity strategies to conserve supplies,” she said.
Additionally, Wright said the hospital subjected its employees to an outside auditor during the summer who was instructed to validate the legal relationship of family members in order to maintain their health insurance benefits.
“If you didn’t have documentation to show you are married, or whatever the case may be, you are kicked off of your health insurance plan,” Wright said. “This hospital has never, ever done anything like this before. But this is geographically, and conveniently, a low-income area that perhaps documentation isn’t something that is easily shown.”
It was the third point in her October email as well. In the email, Wright said “Obstructing access to affordable healthcare goes against the moral conscience of America. ... That decision remains a cruel reminder that the distrust felt between frontline workers and leadership is not a oneway street.”
The hospital did not deny the verification took place and said it is their “responsibility to monitor cost and affordability of their benefit plans by ensuring that only eligible dependents are enrolled in these benefits.” Headington confirmed they conducted a dependent eligibility verification audit through Consova Corporation, a human resources firm.
“The YRMC dependent audit confirmed eligibility for most all dependents insured under our plan with only a small number of employees who were unable to demonstrate eligibility of dependents in the plan,” Headington said.
In the midst of the second surge, where rising holiday cases, ambulance diversions and impending physician burnout may have led people to believe healthcare workers are indispensable to the both the public and the hospitals they serve, Wright said Yuma Regional’s “careless mistreatment” has implied, indirectly, they see them as “nothing more than replaceable.”
But in the way Gilman’s bravery inspired Wright to do more than “sit back and take it,” she hopes sharing her own story will do the same for other healthcare workers fearing repercussions for speaking up while “risking everything” on the frontlines.
“They have created a culture of silence for people who need a voice now more than ever,” Wright said. “We cannot accept this.”
“They have created a culture of silence for people who need a voice now more than ever.” Corrigan Wright