Despite working within what they call a stressful environment, the nurses have taken on the duty to sign up as many families as they can to the program.
“We appreciate not only their hard work and all that they do. This is an additional step that they don’t have to make sure the families are signed up for imagination library. We are so thankful that they do, and I know the families are thankful that they do,” said Danielle Velez, coordinator for Imagination Library.
Thousands of nurses and other medical professionals across New York could lose their jobs next week when a state mandate requiring them to be vaccinated for coronavirus is scheduled to be enforced. If that happens, it would compound a staffing crisis already afflicting many hospitals and long-term care facilities — including group homes for disabled individuals, where some nurses are being forced to work 24-hour shifts.
The state Department of Health's latest estimates indicate that about 81 percent of hospital employees have been fully vaccinated, but many others are declining or reluctant to be vaccinated — putting them on a collision course with the mandate set to take effect on Sept. 27, when those workers will be required to have received at least one COVID-19 vaccination shot.
A mediator has been assigned to resolve a standoff between Upstate University Hospital’s nurses union and the governor’s office over the Covid-19 vaccination mandate for health care workers that takes effect Monday.
The Public Employees Federation Union asked the state Public Employment Relations Board to step in after the union issued a declaration of impasse over the weekend.
A Nashville nurse wrote an op-ed in the Scientific American detailing her experience as a nurse during the pandemic, saying the current wave of delta cases is much worse than what she experienced last year.
“It is so much worse this time. We all have so much less to give. We are still bearing the fresh and heavy grief of the past year and trying to find somewhere to put all this anger. But the patients don’t stop coming,” Kathryn Ivey, a critical care nurse at a medical center in Nashville, said.
“The numbers are higher now than they’ve ever been, the patients coming in younger and sicker. Death is at my shoulder again, as silent as he is relentless,” she said.
The first cohort of Silva’s BSN Pipeline got an early taste of their life after high school last week when they visited the Texas Tech University Hunt School of Nursing and jumped right into simulations of lifelike emergency room scenarios.
The 20 juniors are part of the partnership with Texas Tech University Health Science Center Hunt School of Nursing and will be eligible to receive a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing in 16 months after high school graduation.
As more nurses help patients fight the delta variant they're experiencing a health crisis of their own—burnout.
It's happening so much, Novant Health is offering its frontline nurses a three-day retreat to focus on their well-being. The retreat starts in December to give over 180 frontline nurses the opportunity to receive coaching and mentoring. One Novant Health registered nurse said this kind of support couldn't have come at a better time.