Linda told Nurse.org that she has been personally threatened with potentially being “walked out” by hospital administration if she did not comply with her assigned patient assignments—ratios that were contractually inaccurate, forcing her to take nearly double the patients she could possibly have. “The ratio was supposed to be three to four,” she says. “But very rarely, were we allowed to have only three patients, even though our contract–that is seemingly safe–says three.”
She cites many problems that she has personally witnessed as a Registered Nurse with Ascension, including:
Nurses were routinely told they must draw their own labs because lab staff was not available.
Nurses are routinely expected to act as pharmacy liaisons–another separate staffed position responsible for reconciling home medications for the PCP.
Entire units are being shut down, reportedly due to a lack of staffing
Grievances filed through the Union that has been ignored.
The loss of benefits for nurses such as discounts in health care services to Ascension employees, and fewer options of medical insurance coverage, frozen pensions, and frequent denial of personal time off.
Physician staff leaving.
Postings for “Lean practitioners,” which Linda explains she was told were positions for people hired to come into the hospital to find ways to save money. “I guess it's not a bad thing, in theory, but slowly over the years, we noticed where they would get rid of in-house services [sic] and that became something that they contracted out of the house,” she said.
Lack of patient transporters, which sometimes resulted in testing delays or requiring an already short-staffed floor to have their own nursing assistants or nurses leave and take patients to test or procedures.
Nurses in long stretches of hallways by themselves with no one to cover them should they need to use the restroom or take a break.
New policies were enacted that allowed ER to simply deliver a patient to the floor with a written sheet of paper without ever having to speak to the receiving floor nurse in the event they were unavailable with other patient needs.
Delays in procedures such as pacemakers or other heart procedures due to inadequate levels of cath lab staff.
Linda also recalled an incident that she called the “turning point” for her when a patient passed away in a manner she believes was directly tied to unsafe patient-nurse staffing ratios.