Nurses get soaked when sprinklers go on during picket in Modesto; hospital gets warning

Doctors Medical Center received a warning from the city of Modesto for watering on the wrong day after nurses picketing outside said the sprinklers were turned on multiple times in an effort to get them to disperse.

Nurses at Doctors and seven other Tenet Healthcare-affiliated hospitals in California picketed Tuesday to bring attention to what they say is inadequate staffing for nurses, leading to forced overtime and missed breaks.

Krystyne Dickerson, a registered nurse who works in the neurological unit at Doctors, said the sprinklers came on five times during their three-hour demonstration Tuesday morning.

The nurses allege that the sprinklers were turned on, for about 20 minutes each time, in an effort to get the picketers to disperse.

One of the picketers said that when they asked “the facilities engineering manager to turn the sprinklers off, he stated that the order to turn the sprinklers on and off came from ‘way above him’ and he could not turn them off.”

The hospital’s address ends in an odd number. Only even-numbered addresses are allowed to water on Tuesdays.

A spokesperson for Doctors Medical Center had not responded to requests for comment as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Modesto spokesman Thomas Reeves said the city got several anonymous tips about water usage at Doctors.

“Our water crew went out, confirmed the usage and issued a Notice of Violation” for watering on the wrong day,” Reeves said in an email. “The Notice of Violation acts as a warning (not a citation), and the next violation would result in an official citation.”

More than 3,700 registered nurses represented by the California Nurses Association at Tenet hospitals are in ongoing contract negotiations that began in September 2018 with the Dallas-based corporation.

The nurses say that due to under-staffing, they are missing breaks, being forced to work overtime, and being called back into work sometimes within hours of ending their shifts.

Dickerson said the operating room at Doctors is where nurses most often are being forced to work overtime, not for emergency situations but most often scheduled procedures.

Registered nurse Shiloh Garcia said Tenet paid nearly $8 million in penalties for more than 140,000 missed breaks in its California hospitals from 2016 to 2018.

“We are not getting adequate rest time between shifts to provide safe and quality care for our patients,” Garcia said. “When a hospital hires adequate staffing ... this will mean nurses aren’t fatigued and there are no accidents and injuries.”

Tenet officials declined to comment Tuesday on the company’s increased reliance of on-call nurses, but said they are disappointed in the union’s actions.

“Our hospitals are fully operational and our staff’s focus, as always, is on providing exceptional quality patient care,” Todd Burke, director of communications for Tenet Healthcare in California, said in an email to The Tribune of San Luis Obispo.

The San Luis Obispo Tribune contributed to this report.

This story was originally published May 29, 2019 at 4:08 PM.