Jeopardizing Patient Care
Consistent with Prime’s longtime efforts to generate profit off of vulnerable communities, they are now doing everything they can to cut the number of registered nurses working in the hospital. Highly trained and experienced RNs are to be replaced with staff with less training and a more limited scope of practice if Prime gets their way. Unfortunately, this means fewer RNs at the bedside with more job duties and stress on them; a recipe for more burnout, mistakes and bad outcomes.
Nurses at Prime Hospitals are doing more work than ever with fewer resources and staff. There are shifts in which the Emergency Department is staffed with two nurses all night and there are no housekeeping staff available to take out waste and clean rooms.
The Staffing Crisis At Prime
When nurses are routinely required to care for more patients than is safe, it’s a crisis for both patients, who receive inadequate care, and nurses, who daily risk both their license and moral injury to care for more patients at a time than is possible to do safely. Research has shown:
Safely staffed hospitals have lower mortality rates.
Hospitals with better nursing environments and above-average staffing levels are associated with fewer patients losing their lives.
For every patient added over 4 patients per nurse, the risk of a surgical patient dying increases by 7%.
To make matters worse:
To make matters worse, chronic short-staffing tends to snowball, as it leads to high turnover rates at hospitals and staffing that becomes more and more unsafe – and not just for patients.
Lower Bucks Hospital and Suburban General Hospital have both struggled to attract and retain bedside staff as Prime allows the staffing levels in the hospitals to fall without actively working to address the issue of recruitment or retention.
Prime’s failure to staff their Pennsylvania hospitals has created unsafe conditions in which there are not enough registered nurses to meet staffing guidelines. As a California based employer, the only state with legally mandated nurse to patient ratios, Prime is capable of staffing safely and to the law in California but refuses to do so in Pennsylvania.
At bargaining for the previous contract, their attorney told the Union they do not have to staff safely in Pennsylvania “because there is no law to force them to do so.”
In our current negotiations, management has proposed to cut positions that are critical for nurses to provide safe care, increase patient-to-nurse ratios, and in the process, completely destroy the existing patient staffing guidelines. Their proposal directly contradicts their needs at the hospital. Every day, they are asking staff for float and resource shifts, the same positions they are proposing to cut.
This Is A Pattern
Roughly 1,500 essential workers at four hospitals in Los Angeles County held a five-day strike last October to protest staffing shortages, dangerous working conditions, and unfair labor practices by hospital management.
Two months later, the nurses at Suburban Community and Lower Bucks Hospitals followed suit.