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A Few Clouds Franklin Hospital nurses air grievances
Call for lower patient-nurse ratios; management terms requests unreasonable
About two dozen nurses stood on the sidewalk in front of Franklin Hospital on Sept. 10 with signs urging drivers to “Honk for Nurses,” blowing whistles and chanting slogans.
The hospital’s 285 nurses are currently working without a contract. With the help of the New York State Nurses Association, they are negotiating the terms of a new three-year contract with hospital management.
“We’re trying to get safe staffing, a safe contract, because it’s very hard to take care of patients in this situation,” said Eileen Laracuenti, a staff nurse in the hospital’s emergency room. “We’re under constant stress … there’s just not always enough nurses to go around, and then you have to feel the stress because you have to decide who needs your time. When and if you make a wrong decision, it can mean somebody’s loss of life or limb.”
The situation Laracuenti described is one in which nurses can have anywhere from five to 15 patients to attend to in the emergency room, with varying degrees of urgency. Other nurses complained that each E.R. shift is supposed to begin with eight nurses but sometimes starts with six, and that patients are kept waiting in the E.R. because other units don’t have enough staff to handle them. Several said they often work 12½-hour shifts with no lunch break. Another complaint was that managers who have more medical training than nurses routinely refuse to get involved with patient care, saying it isn’t their responsibility.
Patient-to-nurse ratio guidelines differ from unit to unit, with the intensive care unit limiting a nurse’s patient load to two. The last union contract, which expired at the end of 2013, limited the number of patients per nurse in other units to eight. That is too high, nurses said, and management has proposed removing the ratio cap entirely.
“In the contract, actually what they want to do is take away the ratios, and they would make the decision how many nurses are needed and when,” Laracuenti said. “But the nurses who are actually taking care of the patients are the ones who are better able to determine that, because we’re the ones at the bedside.”
