Protest by Nurses

Re “Nurses Protest Over County’s Pay Offer,” Feb. 13.

We are extremely displeased with The Times’ report about the Ventura County nurses’ protest. Your story reported only the pay raise issue now being negotiated by the California Nurses Assn. It ignored information about a shortage of skilled nurses at county medical facilities and about an ill-advised solution to this problem that administrators have put into effect.

This solution is to take any available nurse who is in an area that is understaffed and force that nurse to work in the understaffed specialty. This places both patients and nurses at risk, because each specialty has its own skills to which a nurse must be educated and oriented. Without such education and orientation, no one is safe.

At the Feb. 12 protest, nurses were vocal about unsafe assignments. One intensive care unit nurse was told to work a pediatrics assignment with four infants and with no prior pediatrics experience or orientation.

We, together with other nurses who work with outpatient mentally ill persons, have been mandated to fill in the gaps at the inpatient county mental health facility after a one-day orientation--a job that requires skills that have always been taught to newly hired nurses in a two-week orientation.

When administration says we must use work hours in the inpatient facility, we are not available to our regular patients during those hours, we are not able to care for inpatients competently and we are at risk of personal injury because of our lack of skills. Everyone loses.

An obvious reasonable solution is to hire more fully qualified staff. Nurses are responsible, conscientious people who want to do the job expected of them--to take the best care of patients. To do this job, nurses need administrators to take the best care of them.

PATRICIA M. WELCH, RN, Ojai

ROCKY BETH SILVER, RN, Ventura