Some health care workers, burned out after nearly 2 years of fighting the pandemic, fear risking retribution from their employers for reporting a safety concern.
Marian Weber, a travel nurse in Alaska, said the not-for-profit PeaceHealth rescinded her contract after she raised a concern about patient safety.Marian Weber says she wanted to make Ketchikan, Alaska, her forever home. With its widespread greenery and rainy days, and waterfront crowded by houses, it was a long-awaited dream. And staying for good seemed like a real possibility.
Instead, Weber said the patients in need of critical care had been placed in the medical-surgical unit with opaque doors and without a central monitoring system, making continuous observation difficult. She says she was worried that nurses might miss something, potentially leading to “catastrophic consequences.
Following her termination for what PeaceHealth said was “creating an unsafe hostile environment,” she filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board . “Nurses have to speak up in order to make sure the patient doesn’t have a bad outcome,” said Donna Phillips, Alaska Nurses Association’s labor council chair and a former nurse.
“I just feel like, ‘Is this really happening?’ Because I’ve always just really prided myself on being a nurse,” said Collins, 41. “That’s part of my personality, being a nurse and making sure that I take really great care of my patients. And so it’s been a huge blow to my sense of worth.” The problem of nurses being overworked, even in unionized hospitals, has been an issue for at least a decade, said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor and professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, but Covid has made the problem even worse.
With regard to staffing ratios Koekkoek said, “Across all our facilities, in Washington and elsewhere, PeaceHealth consistently meets or exceeds all regulatory requirements for staffing and the provision of safe, effective care.” In addition to the claim against PeaceHealth Southwest, there was a separate claim on alleged unpaid wages due to time-clock rounding made against PeaceHealth St. Joseph and St. John.
Ming Lin, an emergency medicine physician, filed a lawsuit to get his job back at St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, Washington, which is owned by PeaceHealth. He says he was fired in March 2020 after critiquing his hospital’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. He postedThe letter outlined seven safety concerns related to Covid-19, including “waiting for influenza test" before deciding it's the coronavirus.
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