Nurse Labor Relations News

Yesterday, we looked at the agenda of the upcoming Regents meetings in March. The Health Services committee meets off-cycle and thus isn't part of the agenda of the regular bimonthly meetings. But, of course, there is always the public comments option. And there are likely to be comments from nurses about staffing. From the LA Times:

Nurses at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and UCSF Medical Center at Parnassus went public this week with complaints about overcrowding and staffing issues that they say have led to eroding conditions for patients. At the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, patients sometimes lie in hallways on gurneys for days at a time, said Dianne Sposito, an emergency room nurse at the hospital. “There’s lots of downsides to this,” Sposito said in an interview. “How do you give proper care in a hallway?”

UCLA nurses affiliated with the California Nurses Assn./National Nurses United union held a rally Wednesday [of last week] outside the Los Angeles hospital to express their concerns and urge hospital officials to improve their practices. Sposito also said patients with serious conditions have waited several hours to receive care. Those include people enduring chest pains, transplant patients with complications, people experiencing excruciating pain not being able to get morphine and people needing mental health treatment not being seen right away. She said that on a typical day the emergency room fills up so quickly that by 11 a.m., people are forced to wait in tents near the entrance...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-01/uc-system-hospital-nurses-patient-overcrowding.