Health Care Hitting a Critical Point in Staffing Shortages

On Thursday, January 12, 2023, over seven thousand nurses at two private New York City hospital systems ended their strike after three days on the picket line. Nurses returned to work at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai in Manhattan following an agreement to increase staffing and improve working conditions.

Nurses protested that immense staff shortages hinder their ability to provide patients with the care they deserve. Each hospital has more than one thousand beds and only three thousand-five hundred union nurses. Kelly DePalma, a night nurse in the Montefiore emergency room explained hospitals bombarded her with fifteen or more patients as soon as her shift started. DePalma explains that “the medication is ordered, you give them that, but you don’t have time to do much else. You’re just kind of treading water to get through the night.”

Since the Coronavirus pandemic, staffing shortages are a major concern and a massive issue around the globe. Last year, five thousand nurses in Minnesota went on strike, as did two thousand mental health workers in California and Hawaii. Many nurses left hospital jobs due to the trauma of the first wave of the virus, and nurses who worked through the arduous peak of the pandemic are overworked and demand better working conditions.

Hospitals in Las Vegas, Nevada deal with the common issue; nursing shortages. To achieve the national average, Nevada would need to recruit more than four thousand registered nurses, and according to Diego Trujillo, President & CEO of Las Vegas Health Care, the city is roughly five thousand nurses short and on the cusp of taking emergency action. The problem is that statewide hospitals are becoming overburdened because of the nursing shortage.

Brian Paonessa, a registered nurse in the valley for almost eight years, spoke out about the impending consequences for the quality of patient care as the overworking of nurses continues. “When that patient-to-nurse ratio is that high, you’re putting your license at risk but you are also putting your patient’s lives at risk, and that is the scary part about it.”