Gov. Newsom must address California’s hospital safety violations amid COVID-19 surge

Before California adopted a landmark safe staffing law, some patients had to call 911 from their hospital beds because nurses were so short-staffed there were long delays responding to urgent call buttons.

Two decades later, the memory of those days seems to have vanished in Sacramento, even as nurses are working exhausted, for multiple extra shifts, struggling to keep up with the flood of gravely ill patients overwhelming hospitals in the midst of this deadly pandemic.

Incredibly, state regulators have handed hospitals blanket permission to make conditions worse, and more dangerous, in California hospitals. With a green light from the California Department of Public Health, many hospitals are forcing beleaguered nurses to care for more COVID-19 patients at once, at a time when we are sinking under the current crush.

As Jane Sandoval, an ER registered nurse at a Sutter hospital in San Francisco, put it in late December, “Sutter now wants emergency department nurses to take on six patients at once. That would mean less than 10 minutes per hour with each one, as I rush between them. Some of my patients could be headed to the ICU, some could have heart failure or other complications of COVID-19 — all of them will be put at risk by having only mere moments of my care.”

Less time for each individual patient means less time for nurses, already under acute stress after 10 pandemic-ravaged months, to monitor and assess the rapidly changing conditions of patients, including those on ventilators, gasping for breath. It increases the risk of medication errors, as well as other mistakes that spread the virus, meaning more infections and deaths for patients and caregivers.

“We know that safe staffing saves lives,” said Mawata Kamara, another Bay Area ER RN. “Some hospitals are already requiring nurses to care for more patients than is safe. Removing safety standards will only increase the suffering and the death count for patients, nurses and other health care workers.”

More than 71,000 California healthcare workers have been infected and 265 have died.

“With staff getting sick and with more RNs out, who will take care of the patients then?” asked Marysville RN Rashelle Harig.

Rather than protecting our frontline staff, state officials have let many hospitals ignore new state guidelines on regular COVID-19 testing of nurses, and given them approval to violate safe staffing after hospitals avoided planning for a massive winter surge the whole nation knew was coming.

“We advised management months ago to train people for the ICU and to prepare for a surge in patients. If they had actually done what we asked, a nurse could have had many months of training at this point,” Kamara said.

Even while gifted over $13 billion in federal stimulus grants and loans, California hospitals have laid off and furloughed nurses, closed units and driven many nurses to resign by creating unsafe conditions.

A scramble for nurses from other states and even other countries now runs up against a hard reality: Few nurses want to enter hospitals where they will put their own lives in jeopardy every day, especially with the blanket waivers the state has approved.

Now is not the time to roll back the protections California patients have been able to count on since those days when they had to call 911 from their hospital beds. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the CDPH should rescind the staffing waivers, and focus on improving safety conditions, not eliminating them.