Our Lips Are Sealed
I don’t have very much information on this story, other than a brief press release, but it appears that several nurses were suspended for speaking up about staffing woes. If is unclear if they went to the press without first trying to work within their facility, or going through the chain of command, or what.
However, I have heard anecdotally, that nurses have been “ordered” by their facilities never to tell patients that they are short staffed. You know, a big smile on the face and everything hunky-dory. Of course, the patient may be wondering why their medication is 12 hours late, or why they’re sitting in a pool of piss for the past 24 hours and no one has answered their call bell–but the nurse is forbidden to say a thing.
Silver Spring, MD—At a press conference in Lexington Friday, August 12 at 10 a.m. (EDT), United American Nurses (UAN) Secretary-Treasurer Mike Nilsson, RN, Kentucky Nurses Association (KNA) President-elect Pat
Tanner, MPA, BSN, RN, and KNA Executive Director Sharon Eli-Mercer, MSN, RN CNAA BC will bring the message that the Appalachian Regional Healthcare nurses who spoke up for safe staffing should be applauded, not
disciplined.
Recently, nine nurses in the Beckley, West Virginia, and Hazard, Kentucky, hospitals of Appalachian Regional Healthcare were suspended for one day without pay for alerting prospective patients and the community to
dangerously low levels of nurse staffing at both facilities. Numerous studies have shown the indisputable link between unsafe staffing and an increase in medical errors that can result in preventable patient injuries and deaths.
All speakers, as well as nurses employed at ARH, will be available for comment.