Night shift nurses that worked in an emergency care unit in a Detroit hospital staged a sit-in, refusing to work. Their only condition to continue working, would be to allow more nurses to come and help with the increased number of patients.
After careful deliberation, hospital administrators decided that they would not bring on extra staff and left the nurses who refused to work with an ultimatum. To get to work or go home. This deliberation took 4 hours for the hospital administrators to make.
A physician whose identity remains anonymous shares that some nurses decided to leave, given the ultimatum. Once most of the night shift nurses in the facility left, day shift nurses were told to continue working which extended their shifts into 24-hour shifts. Detroit Medical Center Communications Manager, Jason Barczy told CNN “We are disappointed that last night a very small number of nurses at Sinai-Grace Hospital staged a work stoppage in the hospital refusing to care for patients. Despite this, our patients continued to receive the care they needed as other dedicated nurses stepped in to provide care.”
ER Nurse, Sal Hadwan tells shares in a Livestream video on Facebook the nurses in the Sinai Grace Hospital have reached their “breaking point.” “We had two nurses the other day who had 26 patients with 10 ventilators,” Hadwan shared. “The nurses need extra help because for three straight weeks they’ve had more than 110 patients in the ER,” he added.
Within the recent activity, Nurses from across the world have been expressing concerns with the handle of hospital administrators during this pandemic. President of the Michigan Nurses Association, Jamie Brown tells CNN, “Nurses around the state are desperately doing everything we can to keep our patients and ourselves safe. Eventually, a tipping point is reached where the best thing any RN can do for their patients, their families, and their coworkers is to speak out rather than remain silent. Until hospitals start taking the concerns of nurses seriously, it’s only a matter of time before more actions like these occur. It is absolutely essential that hospitals start working with nurses and stop silencing our voices,” she continued.