California Nurses Lead Nationwide Strike Over Lack of Ebola Protection to Spotlight Hospital Cuts

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/labor/california-nurses-lead-nationwide-strike-over-lack-ebola-protection-spotlight-hospital-cuts



Crowds of nurses dressed in red and hoisting signs proclaiming “Kaiser RNs Are The Heart of Patient Care” and “On Strike For Health and Safety” launched a two-day strike at 26 Northern California hospitals Tuesday. The protest will expand to 15 states on Wednesday to highlight how corporate cost-cutting is harming nurses and patients.

“We are pretty infuriated. We are working for a corporation that just released their third quarter earnings and they have $3.1 billion in profits—a record,” said Kathy Roemer, a maternity nurse who has worked at Kaiser’s Oakland, Calif. hospital for a decade. “Meanwhile, you have nurses that walk into their job every single day and they are seeing an erosion of patient care. Kaiser is engaging in a business model that denies care to patients.”

“What does the erosion look like?” she said. “Go into the emergency room. People who would have been admitted into the hospital a few years back are no longer getting admitted and are sent home. If you are admitted, you’re admitted to a lower level of care than nurses think you need—not intensive care but a medical-surgical unit. In intensive care, it’s one or two nurses per patient. In medical-surgical, it’s much less.”

Roemer’s comments typify the parade of management-created horribles striking nurses recited from the podium outside Kaiser’s hospital in Oakland, where the nation’s largest bargaining unit of registered nurses, with 18,000 members, is in a nasty dispute with the nation’s largest HMO, or health-maintenance organization. The outcome is likely to establish precedents that will resonate nationally, as it includes a contract negotiation that affects staffing levels, nurse-patient ratios, training for care-related settings, and its growing use of less trained staffers and outpatient services.