Sanford nurses rally for safe staffing, joining a national day of labor action | Orlando Area News | Orlando

A group of registered nurses at HCA Lake Monroe Hospital in Sanford joined a national day of action on Tuesday, uplifting a need for safe staffing levels in their hospitals.

“We care,” said Lorraine Sikes, an emergency room nurse, who rallied with fellow off-duty nurses outside of the Central Florida hospital Tuesday morning.

That’s the biggest thing she wants the public to understand. “We really want that patient to get what they need. We really want to make sure that every single need is met.”

Owned by the Hospital Corporation of America, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital system, Sikes’ hospital was one of over a dozen sites nationwide where members of the National Nurses United labor union rallied on Tuesday, and one of just three in Florida.

The call to action? For the hospital industry to take safe staffing levels seriously, and for Congress to pass federal legislation, modeled after a California law, to establish nurse-to-patient ratio standards.

“We are saying, ‘Enough is enough’ to our employers who push us to our breaking point with chronic short-staffing and insufficient resources to provide the highest quality of care to our patients,” said Deborah Burger, one of the union’s presidents.

“We know there are enough nurses to meet the demand, there is just a lack of will on the part of the hospital industry to staff appropriately because they prioritize profits over patient care.”

Thousands of nurses nationwide were expected to join the day of action, coast to coast, outside hospitals in California, Texas, New York and Florida.

While individual issues at hospitals can differ, a commonality nurses say they’re facing is a crisis in unsafe staffing: nurse-to-patient ratios that leave staff inadequately equipped to care for patients in the way that they deserve.

Sikes told Orlando Weekly she’s troubled by a decline in patient care she’s seen at her hospital, tied to an understaffing problem that’s manufactured by the industry.

“If you’re in pain, you don’t want to have to wait five, let alone 30 minutes for a nurse to get down there because she’s trying to medicate other patients,” she said. Or, in her case, because she’s trying to save someone’s life in the ER.

She, and her union, believe the “nursing shortage” industry leaders profess is a myth — if anything, failing to give nurses the resources and support they need is driving people out of the profession.

“We really want to make sure that the care we’re giving them is the appropriate care, and it’s done in the appropriate amount of time,” said Sikes.

Understaffing hospitals is a systemic, decades-old problem, according to the union. It’s not exclusive to Florida, let alone Central Florida.

But HCA Healthcare, a hospital system with 184 hospitals nationwide and 46 just in Florida, is one of the more well-known offenders.

A recent report published by the Service Employees International Union — a labor union that represents other hospital staff at HCA Lake Monroe — found that staffing ratios at HCA hospitals were 30% lower than national averages.

An NBC News report spotlighting conditions within a Florida HCA hospital in Hudson recently triggered an inquiry from Republican Congressmen Marco Rubio and Gus Bilirakis.

The Tennessee-based company, headed by millionaire CEO Sam Hazen, has disputed claims of understaffing at their hospitals.

Here in Florida, registered nurses also rallied Tuesday outside of HCA Florida’s Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte — a facility that was hit incredibly hard during Hurricane Ian last year — and HCA Florida Largo Hospital near Tampa.

And the ramifications of understaffing go beyond the work performed by RNs.

Workers represented by the SEIU at HCA Florida’s hospital in Kissimmee — including pharmacists, dietary aides and certified nursing assistants — also recently rallied with similar concerns.

After that May rally, HCA Florida Healthcare Public Relations Director Trip Farmer said of SEIU, “This union has a history of attacking and bullying community hospitals with misleading information and staged events designed to garner media coverage.”

Part of the problem, workers say, is corporate greed. HCA Healthcare raked in $5.6 billion in profits in 2022, and reported $15.6 billion in revenues for the first quarter of this year alone.

Hazen, the company’s CEO, had a total compensation of $14.6 million in 2022, leading the pack of the industry’s top-paid CEOs.

“Our hospital alone cleared almost $29 million last year in profits,” Sikes said. “So why can’t they share that with the rest of the hospital?”

In Orlando Weekly‘s earlier stories about labor issues at HCA, when asked for comment, management has responded by saying strikes and rallies are “part of this labor union’s normal actions during collective bargaining, which happens every three years at HCA Florida Osceola Hospital.”

Sikes is hoping the hospital will begin to take nurse retention more seriously. Nurses come in, attracted by sign-on bonuses, but working within their current conditions, turnover is high.

The seasoned nurse, who used to work at an Advent Health facility, says high turnover disrupts the hospital’s ability to provide a continuity of care for patients, and there’s widespread concern about the ramifications of working in a healthcare setting that’s understaffed.

Mistakes on the job. Leaving a patient alone for too long because you’re tasked with attending to too many others at once, risking injury or missed warning signs of trouble.

“Some nurses say they fear for their license,” said Sikes. “I fear for a patient’s life.”

“Some nurses say they fear for their license,” said Sikes. “I fear for a patient’s life.”

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The state of California is currently the only state in the nation with minimum safe staffing standards for nurses. National Nurses United fought for the passage of a landmark bill to establish those standards in 1999, which were implemented in 2004.

Lawmakers in Maine are also considering a similar staffing ratios law, according to the union, while a bill in Minnesota was recently rendered toothless.

There’s also the federal route. During the pandemic, healthcare workers were lauded as heroes.

They also suffered burnout, severe staffing shortages and scrambled at times to get necessary personal protective equipment, and the workforce is still reeling from that experience.

That’s why they’re fighting for improvements not just at HCA, or within their individual hospitals, but industry-wide, according to the union, which represents nearly 225,000 members nationwide.

“They’re not going to listen to us unless we’re in numbers,” said Sikes.

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