Nurses ‘incredibly overworked’
Danbury Hospital caregivers demand help
DANBURY — The nurses at Danbury Hospital say they’re understaffed, overworked, and worried about their patients.
“We feel our patients are at risk and in danger by unsafe staffing — to a point that you leave at the end of the day and you wonder if you did enough,” Brittany Manley, a nurse at the hospital, said.
Nurse-to-patient ratios at the hospital are leaving many nurses feeling like they are unable to properly care for their charges. The union reports that ratios are 1.5 to twice the normal ratio. Where normal ratios could be 1-to-4, some nurses are managing 1-to-6 or even 1-to-10 on certain units. In the intensive care unit, where the ratio is usually 1-to-2, nurses have been dealing with three patients each.
The nurses say they’re overwhelmed. And they want to let the public know what’s going on.
A petition, created by Manley on Change.org for the AFT Union 47 Nurses of Danbury Hospital, has over 1,200 signatures already, and explains what’s going on inside the hospital walls.
“If you know a nurse, you’ve seen the stress and trauma we have faced over the last 2 years. From pandemic nursing we learned how terrifying it can get, and with COVID numbers increasing, we need to establish safe and effective staffing plans,” it reads in part.
“We want to show administration we have the public’s support in demanding safe patient ratios. We care. We protect. We serve.
We are nurses.”
The hospital, which is part of the Nuvance Health system, responded through Nuvance spokeswoman Andrea Rynn, who said that Nuvance is “committed to effectively staffing all of our facilities to ensure we are providing high-quality, safe care to our patients. While every industry has felt the impacts of the nationwide labor shortages, the healthcare industry has been profoundly affected.”
Rynn added that Nuvance is committed to providing competitive pay and benefits while also using innovative recruitment tactics to attract new hires.
Eleven nurses gathered in a conference room Tuesday morning to speak about the struggles they have faced at the hospital. Some have worked there for only a handful of years, others for more than 16. State Sen. Julie Kushner, D- Danbury, sat in the room with them.
Each one had stories about how the staffing shortage has impacted their work and their patients.
They recounted long shifts, times when they had too many patients, constantly feeling defeated after work. They talked about their efforts to work with hospital administration without any resolutions. They discussed the 108 nurses they’ve lost in the past two years, and the difficulty of recruiting new hires. At least one said she has been asked to fill in for a specialty she isn’t trained in.
“We leave there feeling deflated. We feel like we didn’t give the care. We leave there feeling like, ‘What did I miss?’ ” said Janice Stauffer, a nurse at the hospital and president of the nurse’s union.
Staffing has been an issue for several years, but COVID “highlighted some already egregious problems,” Stauffer added.
These problems include policies that nurses say are not conducive to retention of staff, lack of open communication, lack of hazard pay, and refusal to discuss the repurposing of non-clinical administrative staff to help out during what the petition calls an “unprecedented staffing crisis.”
“Anyone who is in nursing for the money is not still working here,” Manley said. “We’re here because we want Danbury Hospital to thrive, but it has gotten to a point that that’s not tenable.”
The nurses say nothing happens when they tell administrators about the problems they’re facing.
“Our patients deserve better and we’re told to make do, and ‘We’ll figure it out!’ and then nothing happens,” Manley said.
She couldn’t find words to describe what it felt like to witness that kind of response. Finally, Manley settled on “soul-crushing.”
Rynn said Nuvance has been working with the union representing the nurses to “create ways to retain existing staff, including the creation of new training opportunities, and to provide additional compensation for working extra shifts.”
Stauffer said that the nurses understand there is a national shortage, but still feel that the administration is not meeting their needs during this COVID crisis.
“We have given them many suggestions of what can be done and we feel like we are still having way too many patients to be able to care for in a safe way,” she said.
Keeping nurses on board
While nurses are being hired during the pandemic, Stauffer said it can be hard to retain them because they may move to a workplace with better patient-to-nurse ratios, pivot to travel nursing, which provides much better compensation, or even move to the administrative side of the business.
At one point, the union had 608 nurses. Now they’re down to 547, which includes 12 new nurses still going through orientation.
Hiring new nurses brings its own struggles. Some new nurses who graduated from nursing school during the pandemic take extra time to train because they have only ever had virtual clinicals to practice their skills with patients.
“It made it very difficult for a nurse to actually see and touch a patient, and listen to their lungs, and talk with them because so much was online,” Stauffer said.
The nurses at Danbury Hospital then have to spend time teaching new hires how to do something as basic as a physical patient assessment.
“Danbury Hospital used to be the place where people got a job and never left,” said nurse Michalan Sheehan. “We’re asking for help so we can make it a better place to work again and people are lining up at the door to get a job there.”
Some nurses are just left feeling inadequate, unable to properly care for patients, and asked to stretch themselves thin.
Nurse Donda Hilke was asked to take an assignment in another unit — a unit that requires a more rigorous, higher level of care for patients. Hilke is not trained in this type of care, yet was still asked to take on four patients, she said.
She said she felt she could not give those patients the care they needed, which felt “horrible” and “frustrating.” But someone had to do it because the nurses in that unit were also overworked and understaffed. So she did what she could.
It’s not just the patients whose health suffers. Nurses have started to realize the effect the pandemic has had on their own mental health.
Some, like Manley, struggle from post-traumatic stress disorder — a result of working through the first brutal waves of COVID. Manley said she started doing better over the summer, but that all changed a few weeks ago around the time Connecticut started seeing its latest COVID surge.
One day, Manley had just worked a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. overnight shift, and offered to stay on because there was no unit coordinator to facilitate patient movement and discharges. Then another nurse wasn’t able to work. She stayed until 1 p.m.
The next day, she couldn’t get out of bed.
“I felt exactly like I had a year ago when we were losing [against COVID] and I couldn’t get patients what they deserved,” she said. “Nothing breaks a nurse like knowing you’re not enough.”
Brittany Wolff, a nurse who has spent half of her Danbury Hospital career in a global pandemic, has come home from shifts mentally and physically exhausted, unsure if she wants to continue working.
“Every day we’re stretched a little thinner,” she said. “It almost feels like you’re sacrificing one patient for another at some points because you have to make a choice with ‘Will I have time to do this for one patient and not another?’”
Kushner sat quietly in the room until the nurses had finished sharing stories. At that point, she spoke about her observations of the staffing issues over the years and concern with what was going on.
Kushner is deputy president pro tempore, chairwoman of the Labor & Public Employees Committee, and vice chairwoman of the Public Health Committee. In the two years of the pandemic, she said the hospital staffing situation has become more apparent and dire.
“We know that when there’s safe staffing, there’s better patient outcomes,” she said. “The only thing stopping this is concern about the bottom line, and that’s the wrong way to look at this issue.”
“It really is a matter of life and death for the patients,” Kushner said. “They’re just incredibly overworked.”