‘It’s about patient safety.’ Blake nurses protest possible layoffs, staff shortages
The threat of impending layoffs in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t helping morale at Blake Medical Center, several nurses said in a protest Thursday morning.
While working to provide the best care possible, nurses say the strain of staff shortages and the lack of protective equipment are major disruptions to their working conditions.
About 20 nurses took part in the demonstration, joining staffs at 14 other HCA Healthcare hospitals across the nation fighting against similar issues. Organizers planned a similar protest at Doctors Hospital of Sarasota Thursday night.
“We came here to stand up for patient safety,” said Kim Brooks, a 15-year registered nurse at Blake and member of the National Nurses United union that organized the protest. “(Hospital administrators) have not been working with us. They gave us two options: layoffs of 10 percent or delaying the layoffs for six months with a freeze on raises.”
“It’s already a stressful time during the pandemic,” she added.
Brooks and other nurses argued that a shortage of nurses ultimately has a negative effect on the community they work every day to protect. Possible layoffs don’t make sense, especially since HCA Healthcare, the company that operates Blake, received $700 million from the federal government as part of the CARES Act relief bill, they said.
Reached for comment Thursday afternoon, Lisa Kirkland, Blake’s director of marketing, noted that the hospital has not furloughed or laid off any employees and denied nurses’ claims that they have been threatened.
“We reached out to the NNU, but they rejected our plan to continue the pandemic pay program that pays caregivers who aren’t able to work their normal hours due to the pandemic,” Kirkland said in an email. “Comments regarding staffing, equipment and possible layoffs are simply not accurate.”
Kirkland added that HCA Healthcare executives have taken pay cuts and other HCA employees have agreed to forgo wage increases amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“The goal of HCA Healthcare’s pandemic pay program is to keep our caregivers employed and receiving paychecks at a time when hospitals throughout the country are experiencing significant declines in patient volume and there is not enough work for them,” Kirkland said in a statement.
But nurses Thursday described busy shifts where they have been asked to account for twice as many patients as usual.
“A lot of nurses are in fear of losing their license and working in conditions where they don’t want to make mistakes with patients that we’re taking care of right now, so they quit. That’s not what we want,” said April Sisco, a union representative and registered nurse at Blake.
“I love what I do and I want to continue doing it. The bottom line is that this about patient care. We care about patients and want to provide that exceptional care,” she continued.
“We’re protecting nurses so that we can protect patients,” said Jill Hunter, an advanced practice registered nurse-in-training, who has been at Blake for more than 20 years.
Efforts to resolve complaints with administrators at the hospital have been shut down, according to several nurses. Brooks explained that nurses began documenting whenever they worked a shift understaffed. Those documents have been passed along to supervisors without any remedy, she said.
“It’s not that we haven’t reached out to the hospital, but they don’t really say anything,” Brooks noted. “We don’t feel like they’ve been working with us.”
Nurses are also still unhappy with the lack of personal protective equipment as the threat of exposure to the novel coronavirus continues. They urged Blake to provide more masks and other gear in a separate protest on April 2.
Community support could make the difference, Brooks said, urging members of the public to call or write to health care officials at Blake Medical Center.
“This directly involves and affects the patients we care for,” said Karen Francis, a staff nurse at Blake. “They keep talking about laying us off — then who is going to be around to take care of them?”
This story was originally published May 28, 2020 at 1:42 PM.
