COVID didn’t cause all these issues.
It peeled back the, the layers
to show what was actually happening.
[NowThis’ Chelsea Frisbie] Hannah Drummond is an emergency room nurse
in North Carolina.
The pandemic exposed that a business model doesn’t work
when it comes to health care because each individual human being
has infinite variables and has dignity that exists far beyond something
coming off of a factory line.
Hospitals are still understaffed, according to Drummond.
Nobody’s coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.
[Hospitals have] cut down on the number of techs that we have,
and we often don’t have housekeeping anymore.
I’m literally drawing all my own blood,
I’m doing my own transporting,
I’m taking my patients to the bathroom, I’m cleaning them up,
as well as all my duties as their nurse.
And some days I am taking on more patients than I’m supposed to.
And the hospital just seems to be, like, using, you know,
this crisis, since COVID started, of not having enough nurses,
but it’s, like, you are cutting things left and right, so, like, what’s the crisis?
Is it the lack of bodies or is it your inability to prioritize safety?
The hospitals are touting this rhetoric
and even the government is touting this rhetoric
of, like, ‘Oh, there’s a nursing shortage.’
There are 4 million nurses across the country who have active licenses
that are no longer working as registered nurses,
because they’re tired of working in horrendous working conditions
that are unsafe, where they can’t give their patients
the quality of care that they know their patients deserve.
You can only sustain that for so long.
It’s unconscionable that all of the health care industry
while people
were struggling just to get basic access to health care,
like vaccines and mild treatments.
Deborah Burger is co-president of National Nurses United,
the union that Drummond is part of.
She says health care workers across the U.S.
are feeling similar frustrations with the health care system.
They’ve been put in such a difficult position.
Even before the pandemic, we were suffering from
many of the hospital policies designed to increase their profits,
which means that they staffed ‘just in time,’
they had ‘just in time supplies.’
When we had the heads up from what was happening in China,
we realized it was gonna be
really difficult to provide care with the industry model at the time.
And the industry ignored us.
The government at the time ignored us,
so we were left to fend for ourselves.
And you saw what happened. Everybody saw what happened,
which was nurses were using garbage can bags,
they were making do with masks for weeks at a time.
COVID has, yes, it has decreased the cases, but
because the industry is still following that staffing model of just in time,
they’ve cut staffing at a time when they should be
keeping similar staffing levels,
because the patients that we still have in the hospitals are critically ill.
Burger points out that ‘health care worker burnout’ gets a lot of attention
but the industry’s shortcomings are the root of the issue.
We often refer to it as ‘moral distress’ and ‘moral injury.’
It’s not really ‘burnout.’
It’s the actual moral injury that nurses and health care workers are feeling
because they know that they’re not able to do the job they need to do.
And no amount of self-care
is actually gonna help with that because it’s a situation.
It’s not the nurse or the health care worker’s fault.
It’s the fault of the industry.
Both Drummond and Burger agree that the focus needs to be on patient care
and providing health care workers with the necessary resources.
They need to invest their money
and their resources into giving us what we need to take care of patients.
We don’t wanna be heard, we wanna see action.
We wanna see literal changes happen.
I know that nurses would come back
if they knew that they were supported, that they were valued,
and that they could give the care that they know they can give.
And we still have to hold the employers accountable
for the lack of resources,
the lack of support.