“We make it work but at the cost of our breaks and our lunches,” said one registered nurse at the strike.
Holding signs that read, “On strike for safe patient care,” dozens of Sutter Health nurses and health care workers gathered Monday morning outside the Eden Medical Center to demand better staffing and health and safety measures amid ongoing contract negotiations with the healthcare giant.
“Nurses are not able to get their patients call lights quick enough. I work in the ICU and we have to titrate a million drips and have a lot of alarms going off and have to get to them quicker and the nurses do. We make it work but at the cost of our breaks and our lunches,” she said. “We’re working overtime and coming in early just to make sure that the patients are safely cared for.”
“By moving forward with today’s costly and disruptive strike, union leadership has made it clear they are willing to put politics above patients and the nurses they represent — despite the intervention of federal mediators and our willingness to bargain in good faith while under threat of a strike,” a Sutter spokesperson said in a Monday statement. “Our attention is on providing safe, high-quality care to the patients and communities we’re honored to serve.
A Sutter Health spokesperson confirmed that they must provide five days of guaranteed staffing for replacement workers and that “when the union threatens a strike we must make plans that our patients, teams and communities can rely on.” “There are certain procedures we just don’t let travelers do, because we don’t know their experience, we can’t check them off and know that yes, they know how to do this procedure,” she said.
In recent months, COVID case rates and hospitalizations have remained low across the country, prompting Bay Area counties to. However, nurses say that they’re prepared for any future pandemic or influx of cases.