I come from a family of nurses. At Mount Sinai Morningside, where I work as a nurse in the emergency room, my two brothers, sister, mother and uncle are my co-workers. It feels like home as much as a workplace. This is the fourth week I’ve been outside of that home as I hold the line in New York City’s largest nurse strike alongside nearly 15,000 of my colleagues. I want to be back at the bedside with my patients.
We’re striking so that nurses and patients alike can be safe. We’re fighting for adequate numbers of nurses to care for the number of patients we see. We’re also fighting for protections from workplace violence, because nurses shouldn’t fear for our lives on the job.
More than 80 percent of nurses experience workplace violence each year, according to one industry survey. The rate of violent incidents is reportedly increasing, too. Almost all of these assaults are perpetrated by patients, though patients’ family members can also threaten our safety. People don’t realize that hospitals are increasingly dangerous places to work in. Because nurses spend more time than anyone else with patients, we often get the brunt of their anger with the health care industry, lack of adequate services and long wait times.
Throughout my career, I have sustained many injuries and threats. In a recent eight-month period, I was scratched in the face (which left a scar that I cover with makeup daily), kicked in the chest so hard it left bruises, bitten multiple times and spat on. I’ve been pushed, sexually assaulted and punched. I’ve been thrown across the ambulance bay. I’ve had to hide marks of violence from my four young children so they don’t worry about me. I’m used to hearing similar experiences from colleagues. We’re asking for basic safety precautions like metal detectors, better-trained security and a stronger police presence in our hospitals.
Despite the risk of violence in the workplace, I still love my job, my patients and serving my community. In the emergency room, we see our patients at their most vulnerable. With cuts to Medicaid, patients can’t get the care they need elsewhere. They delay visits to routine screenings and pediatricians, then come to us when their health has become an emergency. We see people with substance abuse issues who can’t get into rehab programs, people without homes who don’t have shelter and people with mental health conditions who struggle to get the care they need. The emergency department has become the safety net for all of these failures within the health care system. But this system is breaking down. We need the resources to continue to uphold our nursing oath — to raise the standards of nursing and to do all we can to help those in our care.
A few years ago, I was part of a union-led fight to address short staffing within our emergency room. Nurses sometimes had as many as 16 or 17 patients at a time; when a nurse has that many patients, we don’t take breaks, eat or go to the bathroom. A third-party arbitrator ruled in our favor in June 2023, ordering the hospital to pay nurses who worked understaffed shifts and to hire more nurses to fill vacancies. But management failed to fill the open positions for months, leaving us understaffed by as much as 35 percent. This led to a second ruling two years ago in which another arbitrator ordered my emergency department to pay almost $1 million in compensation to my colleagues and me. Our fight paved the way for similar orders at multiple Mount Sinai departments, ultimately amounting to over $2 million in payments to overworked nurses.
Despite the arbitrators’ orders, Mount Sinai continues to understaff units, creating unsafe conditions for nurses and patients. When you don’t have enough nurses working a shift, those who are working end up with higher caseloads, angrier patients who are upset by the lengthened wait times, and less safe hospitals. This must change.
To adequately care for patients, we need to have a safe nurse-to-patient ratio. California requires there to be one nurse for every four patients in the emergency room. New York doesn’t consistently enforce its staffing requirements for intensive care units, and the New York State Nurses Association has found some hospitals have left emergency room nurses with a staffing ratio as high as 10 to one. Our patients receive slower, less attentive care when we do not have enough nurses to support them.
The moral injury of needing to go on strike to have our concerns about staffing and workplace violence taken seriously is the hardest injury to process. We have an ethical duty to care for our patients; right now, the best way to achieve that is to fight for staffing levels and protections that will help save their lives and keep us healthy enough to keep working. It’s the guilt that eats at us when we don’t have the time to see a patient because of the lack of nurses. I’m a nurse because I love it and it gives me purpose. It’s in my DNA — and there’s nothing else I can imagine doing. We need hospitals to do their part to create safer conditions for patients and staff, because nurses can’t take this any longer.
Sheryl Ostroff is a nurse at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital in New York.
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