COVID has exposed gaping fault lines in already overloaded healthcare systems but it has also created new opportunities, global nursing leaders say.
“Nurses are done being applaud-ed as essential while being treated as expendable,” says Bonnie Castillo.
The Executive Director of National Nurses United, in the USA, said nurses, along with other workers on the frontline of pandemic responses, “have come to recognise ourselves as the very foundation of society”.
Bonnie was speaking during a panel on professional day at the NSWNMA annual conference, along with Canadian nurse leader, Linda Silas, and Shaye Candish, NSWNMA General Secretary.
Bonnie said her union had organised nearly 5000 workplaces and community actions across the US since 2020, including several outside the White House.
She said nurses are at the forefront of “an inspiring labour upsurge across America”, one that has included teachers in conservative states striking and workers organising at corporate behemoths, such as Starbucks and Amazon.
The anger and militancy coming from health workers is being driven by a hospital industry that “sacrifices nurses’ health and safety to the bottom line”, Bonnie said.
Shockingly, the lack of concern for health and safety during the pandemic has contributed to the deaths of 5200 healthcare workers, including 494 registered nurses.
“When COVID hit, instead of rushing in with the protections that we needed our employers kept N95s behind lock and key and tried to implement very unsafe PPE and decontamination processes. Thousands of healthcare workers would still be alive today if our profit-driven employers hadn’t spent decades slashing supply costs.”
A powder keg of stresses
NSWNMA General Secretary Shaye Candish, described a parallel situation in Australia, where a health system that “was already a powder keg of stresses” in the wake of bushfires and shortages of staff and resources, was pushed to breaking point when COVID arrived.
Shaye described the Association’s campaigns around airborne transmission and fit-tested masks and eye protection when providing care of suspected or confirmed COVID patients, as among the Union’s significant wins.
“The sacrifice and dedication of nurses and midwives across NSW in dealing with the challenges has been nothing short of inspiring,” Shaye said. In contrast, the NSW Government’s decision to freeze public sector wages, including those of nurses and midwives, is “a stunning slap in the face”.
“We all shared collective rage as the NSW Government continued to spin the line that our public health system was strong and supposedly coping. This was repeated over and over while you were exhausted, working excessive overtime, maybe working outside your usual scope or in unfamiliar models of care and catastrophically short-staffed, as patient care suffered.”
The NSWNMA’s first statewide strike since 2013, on 15 February this year, was driven by members’ “red hot rage”, Shaye said. More than 150 hospital and community health branches took part in the strike action and then voted for further action just weeks later.
“We’ve had ongoing action since and I could not be prouder of the collective determination and commitment to continue our ratios campaign despite, and because of, the incredible adversity that you’re facing,” Shaye said.
Nurses are leaving in droves
Stress, burnout and unsafe staffing ratios have led to nurses leaving in droves in the US, Canada and Australia, all three panellists said.
Since the beginning of the pan-demic, nursing vacancies across Canada have risen by 133 per cent said Linda Silas, President of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions.
“One in two [Canadian] nurses are looking for the exit sign. The number one reason nurses are burning out in my country is because 83 per cent [say] we don’t have enough staff for them to provide good care.”
“We nurses need to stop being the martyrs of health care,” she said.
In the US, there are over five million RNs with active licences but only 3.5 million who are working; nearly one in five healthcare workers have quit their jobs since March 2020, Bonnie said.
“Not because they can’t cut it but because they can’t handle being systematically denied the resources and protections that they need to do their jobs. Years of organised abandonment has caused an epidemic of moral injury and PTSD in the nursing profession.”
Bonnie said that in the US, “we’ve won improvements in health and safety policies, staffing and provisions to advance racial and gender justice. The key to our success has been our ability to organise and flex our collective power in the workplace. Above all, through our willingness to strike”.
“So, despite these huge challenges … it is a time of incredible oppor-tunity,” she said. “And we’re in a better position now than maybe at any other point in my lifetime, to build nurse power and win workplace democracy.”