Nurses hold rallies to protest staff shortages at hospitals in Stanislaus County
Nurses gathered outside Doctors Medical Center in Modesto on Wednesday to urge their employer to deal with understaffing that isn’t safe for patients.
The California Nurses Association held informational pickets and public actions at nine hospitals in California that are owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp., including Doctors of Modesto, Emanuel Medical Center in Turlock and Doctors Hospital of Manteca.
The union said this week that 160 registered nurses have left the workforce at Doctors of Modesto since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Emanuel Medical Center has lost almost 100 nurses.
The union said “untenable” working conditions in the hospitals have driven away nursing staff over the course of COVID-19 pandemic.
The remaining nurses are stretched thin and often work without meals and rest breaks, the union said.
“We don’t have enough staff to safely take care of patients here,” said Aaron Willits, a registered nurse at Doctors of Modesto. “When the nurse should have four to five patients, they have eight or nine patients as a routine.”
Hospitals in California struggled to bring in enough nursing staff for shifts as they were flooded with COVID-19 patients in 2020 and 2021. Since the omicron-variant surge in January and February faded away, hospitals in Stanislaus County had about 20 patients infected with COVID-19, as of Tuesday. None of those patients were in intensive care units, county public health said.
According to the nurses union, many of the nurses hired at the Tenet hospitals between 2019 and 2021 quit because of the workplace conditions.
Many newly hired nurses quit
Willits said the turnover rate among newly hired nurses during that time was 40% at Doctors Medical Center in Modesto, something he has never seen in the health industry before. Willits said he didn’t know of any nurses who quit because of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for healthcare workers.
The union criticized Tenet for not recruiting and retaining enough nurses to fill the gaps in daily staffing. “I also work for another hospital (not in Modesto), but they don’t have the same issue,” Willits said.
A spokeswoman for Tenet said hospitals were fully operational during the informational pickets Wednesday, which were announced ahead of time. The company said, “We value all of our nurses who are represented by the CNA” and is bargaining in good faith with the union to reach an agreement.
Staffing an issue at Emanuel
During the COVID-19 surge in August, a unionized nurse at Emanuel Medical Center in Turlock went public with her concerns about short staffing in the hospital’s emergency department. The nurse said the hospital’s emergency department often had only three nurses on duty, forcing patients to wait four to five hours to be seen.
Krista Deans, a spokeswoman for Tenet’s Northern California Group, said staffing challenges at Tenet hospitals, and hospitals owned by other health systems, have been exacerbated by the pandemic. She said Tenet is using traveler nurses and continues to work on recruitment of nursing staff.
“To support our care teams, we have been exercising all options available to us,” Deans said.
This story was originally published April 27, 2022 at 12:07 PM.
