Minnesota emergency room nurse Cliff Willmeng remembers, during the early days of the pandemic, treating a patient at United Hospital who asked how the nurses were doing. The man was a Vietnam veteran, and Willmeng recalls that he said, "This is your war."
"I kind of laughed, like what do you mean by that?" said Willmeng, who recalled he didn't grasp at the time how horrible the pandemic would become. "He said, 'We dealt with this in Vietnam. You don't know it yet but none of you are ever going to be the same again.'"
Nurses with Michigan Medicine took their fight to protect patients outside the hospital Saturday, walking around the building demanding U of M hire more nurses.
"The staffing is at an abysmal level," says Marina Marzec, a nurse at U of M hospital and a union rep. She says nurses are simply exhausted.
Providence nurses facing a dire staffing shortage in Everett sought help and support from the City Council on Wednesday night.
During public comment, 10 people who said they were nurses at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett said they worry about having too many patients to properly care for them and called the low staffing level "unsafe."
A widespread shortage of nurses at Massachusetts hospitals is only getting more extreme, with an estimated 5,000 vacancies across the state and institutions hemorrhaging cash as they are forced to hire temporary staff at much higher rates.
The California Nurses Association and the University of California have agreed on a new three-year contract that was ratified by a majority of the more than 17,000 nurses who work in UC medical and student health facilities, both sides announced.
The agreement takes effect immediately and will run through Oct. 31, 2025. The prior contract was set to expire this fall.
Having more nurses can save lives and improve the overall quality of care, despite hospitals often having varying numbers of nurses per patient, the National Institute of Nursing Research said.
In a recent study partially funded by the institute, researchers examined cross-sectional data on nurse staffing in 116 different acute care general hospitals across New York.