California hospitals are criticizing a nurses' strike that began on Tuesday over a lack of adequate equipment and training standards for treating patients with Ebola, saying that the protest was political and that nurses' concerns are unfounded. On Tuesday, 18,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses launched a two-day strike in part to protest a lack of adequate equipment and training standards for treating patients with Ebola. The strike affected 21 hospitals and dozens of clinics in California, according to National Nurses United spokesperson Charles Idelson. Nurses at Sutter Tracy Community Hospital and Watsonville Community Hospital also went on strike, according to the union.
As a wave—really a tsunami—of baby boomers retire and age, the nation faces an unprecedented shortage of nearly 1 million nurses by 2030, warns the American Journal of Medical Quality. New York State alone will face a gap of nearly 40,000 nurses. Despite this glaring need, nursing programs are rejecting qualified applicants in record numbers, because of an acute lack of faculty. "These students meet admissions criteria but schools cannot take them because they do not have the capacity to accommodate them," says Lusine Poghosyan, assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Nursing. "We do not have the faculty."
The trade group representing nurse practitioners is moving to position its members for a windfall of new jobs expected as part of an overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs’s healthcare system. VA Secretary Robert McDonald announced plans in September to hire tens of thousands of new clinicians as part of a plan to restructure the agency, following a scandal involving lengthy wait times at agency-run healthcare facilities that led to the ouster of his predecessor, Eric Shinseki. The VA is expected to put the plan into effect on Tuesday, which is Veterans Day.
It doesn't seem like nurses are asking for too much as fears escalate over the spread of Ebola. They're concerned about safety — not just for themselves but for their patients and for the public. But hospital management hasn't responded. Neither has Congress nor the president. That's why some 100,000 registered nurses and nurse practitioners across the country, including 400 at a Washington, D.C., hospital, are going on strike, picketing or holding rallies and candlelight vigils as part of a national "Day of Action" Wednesday to protest their lack of protective gear and training for taking care of Ebola patients.
Following up on a CBS3 investigation started in May, a growing number of nurses are being abused inside hospitals locally and around the country. The latest happened in Minnesota. Surveillance video from a Minneapolis hospital shows a 68-year-old patient attacking nurses with a bar pulled from the side of his hospital bed. Described as being delusional and paranoid, the patient starts in the nurses' station and chases them into a hallway, hitting four of them. The police chief Paul Schnell says, "Two of them actually fell down in the hallway and they were repeatedly struck by the man with the pole."
Nurses at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento will be protected head-to-toe and are prepared to handle the Ebola virus if it shows up at their doors, they said at a media briefing Thursday. The most recent protocols for what is called the "donning and doffing" of protective equipment, released earlier this week, detail an intricate and painstaking 42-step process for putting on and taking off the gear. The protocols are intended to minimize transmission of the Ebola virus, which spreads through bodily fluids, but not air, and can be killed with basic sanitizing materials.