VALLEJO – Dozens of nurses gathered outside of the Sutter Solano hospital with picket signs on Wednesday morning to protest what they say is understaffing in Sutter hospitals. They waved signs that said “Safe staffing now” and chanted “what kind of power? union power!” as cars honked in support.
The healthcare workers are part of the California Nurses Association and its affiliate, Caregivers and Healthcare Employees Union. The picketing was part of a wider day of action, with unionized nurses at 13 different hospitals in California drawing attention to staffing issues.
Registered nurse Marki Henderson, the chief nurse representative for the California Nurses Association at Sutter Solano, has worked at the Vallejo facility for 15 years and said that staffing is inadequate across all of the facility. She noted that it’s gotten progressively worse over the past few years.
“We're out here fighting for safe staffing in support of the nurses and patients because we want the best outcomes for our patients,” Henderson said. “So we're out here to show Sutter that we stand united.”
Henderson said that department understaffing means that many nurses have to work 12-hour shifts and often skip breaks.
“When nurses are tired, they can't even get a chance to take a drink of water or regroup to refocus,” Henderson said. “Then nurses are at a disadvantage of giving patients the best outcomes to delivering great care.”
Sutter did not respond to a request for comment by publication.
The nurses said that the staffing shortages impact everything from intensive care units to the emergency room. Registered nurse Celina Hunter said that nurses often get sent home if the emergency room is slow. But if it suddenly picks up again, it’s difficult to call people back in.
“It can take a couple of hours because they don’t live in the city,” Hunter said. “They live in Concord, or Sacramento, and that’s far. And then sometimes they can’t come back because now they don’t have a babysitter anymore. So it’s an issue when we work on a skeleton staff.”
Henderson said patients definitely notice when care is delayed.
“We feel the brunt of it. Sometimes our patients ask, ‘What took so long? I’ve been on the call light and nobody’s responding to me,’” said Henderson.
Derek Metzger, a registered nurse in intensive care, said that they’d like to be able to serve patients in the emergency room faster. “We want to make sure that when people show up, there are nurses here that are qualified and ready to take care of them, and that we're not scrambling at the last minute to meet those needs,” Metzger said.
Metzger described how nurses often feel a unique kind of burnout when they realize they can’t provide the best care to their patients because they’re stretched too thin. They call it moral injury: a deep distress that someone experiences when they don’t act in alignment with their own values.
“We went to school. We know what we're supposed to do and what needs to happen. We know what good care looks like,” Metzger said. “But when we don't have the staff to make that happen, and we're just putting out fire after fire, that doesn't feel good. And then you go home at the end of the day and think about all the things that you wish you could have done.”
Metzger said nurses often describe it as a moral injury because those feelings of frustration and guilt can last much longer than the burnout that a typical desk job worker might experience.
“This is people’s lives,” Metzger said. “I can meditate, I can go on a wellness retreat, I can do all those things all day long. But if I come back to my facility and I work short-staffed, and something happens to one of my patients, I have to live with that day in and day out. There's no amount of meditation and yoga that can take that away. “
According to the American Nurses Association, just four states mandate a safe staffing ratio of nurses to patients, and California is the only state that requires a ratio of one nurse to five patients across all departments, not just in intensive care like Massachusetts, Oregon, and New York.
The nurses said that Sutter Solano is meeting that mandate, but added that the mandate should be a floor, not a ceiling.
“If you put 20 patients on a floor and then just put four nurses there, you've met the mandate, but who's going to give them breaks?” asked Metzger. He said patients often need to be transported back and forth to surgeries and scans, and it’s “impossible” to handle that if other patients are also calling for help.
“And then emergencies happen too,” Metzger added. “If one of your patients has a heart attack, we have to do CPR. If you just have four nurses on that floor, everybody's going to be consumed with that one event.”
Negotiations between the union and Sutter management are ongoing. A representative for the California Nurses Association said that the contract is up for renewal on Dec. 1.
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