LISTEN TO LORI MARLOWE:
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“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” – author and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who has written on women’s labor history
“We’re fed up. The nurses are tired. We’re going to take a stand,” said Lori Marlowe, a 12-year veteran nurse in the cardiac unit and a member of the negotiating team for the more than 1,600 nurses at Washington Hospital Center (WHC). Friday, nurses at D.C.’s largest hospital, who are represented by National Nurses United (NNU), are going on a 1-day strike. At a press conference on Tuesday, Mayor Vincent Gray said, “We don’t want this to happen.” Gray said he wanted “to see people treated fairly” and that he was talking with both union leadership and hospital management.
“They’re trying to run the hospital like a corporation and not a hospital,” said Marlowe. “Patients need to make sure that there is enough staff so that they get the care that they deserve, so that they can get discharged at an adequate time, and then someone else who’s sicker can come into the hospital.” One of the nurses main demands is lowering the staff-to-patient ratio.
WHC disputes that there is a staff shortage. “A recent Department of Health review confirmed that NNU’s staffing allegations are unfounded,” a WHC statement said. Additionally, WHC contends that the staff-to-patient ratio is not a top priority for the nurses. “Staffing, which is robust at Washington Hospital Center, has not been an area of dispute between the parties in any of the federally supervised sessions.”
An Oct. 6, 2010 Washington Post article on WHC noted, “In labor and delivery, two nurses are supposed to be in attendance for every delivery, but ‘we do it when we can, it just depends,’ said one veteran nurse who did not want to be identified. Many teenagers having babies for the first time need teaching and support, but nurses only have time to do the minimum, taking vital signs and checking medications. ‘I feel like I’m not doing the job I want to do,’ said the nurse, who has more than 20 years experience in labor and delivery. ‘I’m not doing a good job of taking care of them, of meeting the emotional needs.’ Sometimes, that can be as simple as holding a patient’s hand, or helping brush their teeth. When she squeezes that in, patients are so grateful. ‘It just breaks my heart,’ she said.”
Washington Hospital Center is owned by Medstar Health, a $4 billion not-for-profit health-care organization based in Columbia, Maryland. Medstar operates nine hospitals in D.C. and Md., only of which has union nurses. Problems between WHC management and nurses began last February when eighteen nurses were fired, allegedly for being unable to make it to work during the historic snowfalls that crippled the region and shutdown the federal government.
Actually, problems between management and nurses “started even before that,” said Marlowe. “I would say it started back during flu season when they wanted to mandate [that all health-care workers] get the flu shot. Then it turned into the snow firings. The first nurse… that they fired was a board member of the union and she was on the negotiating team. It’s just been an attack on the union for some strange reason, I guess because the hospital saw that we were getting stronger… and they wanted to kind of get the girls in place.”
Wisconsin’s pro-union uprising has not gone unnoticed by the nurses. “This is the time to stand up. We have to fight for our rights. This is what collective bargaining is all about, being able to stand up for what you believe in. We believe that our patients deserve better care than what they’re getting at the hospital.”
Related Links:
http://www.nursesunited.org