Hospital Has Responsibility to Public in Nurses Dispute

The day is clear as yesterday, although it was in the fall of 1960. I walked into a hospital room to visit an 88-year-old lady who was recovering from an automobile accident. Her 90-year-old husband had not survived. This was a new experience for me, a greener than grass rabbinical student.

How fortunate I was that the nursing staff was there, not only for the patient but for me. The concern and compassion that they manifested had a very deep impact on me.

For 40 years, I have been a regular visitor to hospital patients. One lesson has been impressed on me during these decades: A major key to patient recovery is attentive nursing care.

My respect for the nursing profession has grown over the years. I remember my one adult hospitalization. The charge nurse on the floor walked into my room. I asked her to send in a nurse’s aide with some ice chips. Her response was, “Just because I am an RN does not mean that I cannot attend to your state of comfort. Please remember, Rabbi, that we are not merely a profession but a helping profession.”

Her lesson is one that many nurses with whom I have worked over the years have made a reality. It is because of this personal history that I cannot keep silent at this time.

We have a potentially great hospital in our community. St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard has all of the facilities that it needs to be a true servant of our area. Nevertheless, since I moved to Ventura County in 1997 and started visiting patients at this hospital, I have had a tremendous level of frustration. So many times, I found myself with a patient who needed nursing attention, and there was no nurse available. I often walked out to the nursing station and there was not a registered nurse to respond to the call.

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“The nurse is busy with another patient, and there are few ahead of the person you are visiting,” was too often the response.

It is this truly sad state of affairs that the nurses union at St. John’s and its sister hospital in Camarillo has addressed for months. The nurses’ bargaining team has presented its passion for patient care repeatedly.

“We are not happy with staffing levels,” has been its position, almost becoming a mantra. There is no denying the fact that the hospital has been fair in offering its nurses salaries commensurate with salaries at other hospitals in the area, but that is not the issue.

Nurses want to be able to do their jobs! There is more to life than bread alone. There is the principle of the satisfaction that comes with saying, “I have given the very best to my patients, and they are enjoying a better healing process for it.” Salary gains cannot atone for the feeling of futility when a nurse must, at the end of a shift, say, “I could not get to all of them.”

The hospital management does not seem to relate to this level of ethical commitment. It is for this reason that the nurses called a two-week strike in December. The hospital administrator has said, “We won’t discuss specific [staffing] ratios.”

Being unwilling to discuss issues destroys the process of working toward better patient care.

It is the arrogance of refusing to communicate that strikes me, as a religionist and as an ethicist, as a severe breach of ethics. The more than 300 nurses whom I addressed as they stood out in the chill for a candlelight vigil Dec. 21, were there for a purpose. They were not only addressing the hospital administration but they were addressing the people of Oxnard and Ventura.

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The message of the candles was clear: “We shed the light of patient care. We want to remind you, the public, that you have a right to appropriate care. We call upon you to join with us in obtaining that which is rightfully yours, the security of knowing that you will have the undivided, unrushed attention of your healing staff when you need it.”

The clergy can comfort patients with prayer. It is beyond our scope to attend to the patients’ physical needs. It is within our scope to charge the community to remind the hospital leadership of its responsibility to us, the public. It is within our scope to challenge the hospital leadership to use its wisdom and its acknowledgment of its ethical obligations to sit at the bargaining table to discuss the real issue of this dispute. It is certainly within our scope to say, “Do the right thing!”