In 2021, Nurses Continued to be Canaries in the Coal Mine Dawn Cardello, RN, Describes What Nurses Face For years, nurses have spoken out highlighting barriers to quality patient care. They have detailed how poor working conditions and understaffing compromise quality care. During COVID, nurses shed light on the public rhetoric of hospital systems and the private struggle of healthcare workers to get PPE while working. But in 2021, nurses continued to be the canaries in the coal mine letting the world know that our healthcare system continues to be fundamentally broken. What started as an urgent plea has reached a crescendo. In 2021, many nurses escalated their advocacy for themselves and the patients they love and serve. NYSNA nurses organized informational pickets, speak outs and other actions to detail what it is like to work amidst chronic understaffing. Below is an account of the challenges of understaffing by Dawn Cardello, RN, who works at SIUH/Northwell: Most nurses agree that they’ve never seen understaffing worse than it is today. Who would have thought that nurses and healthcare workers would have exited the worst of a deadly pandemic last year only to work under these conditions today? Many hospital administrators refuse to hear our screaming cry for help, as documented in 800-1000 POAs. There is no unit in the hospital that has not been affected. I have been a nurse at SIUH/ Northwell for 34 years, and the situation we find ourselves in is shocking. Many SIUH nurses are caring for 7-10 patients when the ratios should be much lower. Although they do their best, nurses cannot provide safe quality care when spread so thin. I am frightened to see our hospital unraveling. But its not just conditions at my hospital that trouble me. Most hospitals in New York are dealing with short staffing as well. But here is the irony: this hospital is part of the biggest healthcare empire in the state: Northwell Health. Northwell is flush with resources. Amid a deadly pandemic, why are they not investing more in communities, including patients and healthcare workers. Many of us question why hospital executives are withholding resources, refusing to address a staffing crisis and placing the health and wellbeing of patients and caregivers at risk. Most healthcare workers are traumatized after working during the deadly COVID-19 6
2021: We are one
pandemic. Health systems administrators don’t seem to understand that one can survive and still struggle. Just because nurses and other healthcare workers survived the worst days of the pandemic, doesn’t mean that they are physically, mentally or financially sound. Many are weary of excuses, delays, and broken promises. While hospital systems excuse the slow pace of hiring more nurses by saying they are maintaining ‘staffing consistent with census,’ this explanation is illogical. In some parts of the hospital, staffing ratios are dangerously high. In actuality, hospital administrators are being are nonresponsive to the pleas of frontline workers, and this puts patients at risk.
Refusing to Act For nearly a year, Northwell has refused to fill over 60 vacant nursing positions. The hospital has refused to hire and retain a professional, permanent nursing staff. Consequently, in virtually every unit on every floor at SIUH/Northwell, this hospital falls short of nurses needed to staff safely. In fact, ratios are not even close to what professional staffing levels demand. Nursing is about science and caring for patients. For the two to merge, hospital systems such as Northwell must be engaged. They are ultimately responsible for the conditions in our hospital. They have made a mockery of nurses and healthcare workers, patients, and the entire Staten Island community.
This puts all of us — nurses, patients and their families — in danger. Everyone from NYSNA’s President, Nancy Hagans, RN, to our union’s executive director, Patricia Kane, RN, to rank and file members have spoken out about the predicament facing nurses and patients. The question is, ‘who is listening’ and ‘who will act?’
