Hospitals across America are stretched to their limit as doctors, nurses and health care personnel work round-the-clock to save the lives of patients infected with COVID-19. Doctors, nurses and medical personnel are coming together and working under extremely stressful conditions. Last night, in Detroit, MI, a city that’s been hit particularly hard with the Chinese coronavirus, an entire night-shift of nurses at Sinai-Grace Hospital refused to leave the break room to care for an emergency room jam-packed with sick patients—so the administration told them to leave.
CNN– The night shift ER nurses at Sinai-Grace Hospital refused to leave the break room until hospital administrators brought in more nurses to help out, a physician at the hospital told CNN.
Hospital administrators decided, after four hours of deliberation, they would not be bringing in any more nurses to help and that the nurses could get to work or leave the hospital, the doctor said.
Some did then leave, said the physician, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their job.
“We are disappointed that last night a very small number of nurses at Sinai-Grace Hospital staged a work stoppage in the hospital refusing to care for patients,” Detroit Medical Center Communications Manager Jason Barczy told CNN. “Despite this, our patients continued to receive the care they needed as other dedicated nurses stepped in to provide care.”
ER nurse Sal Hadwan filmed a live Facebook video to document the entire night shift walking out of the hospital. “We basically were told to leave because we refused to accept unsafe staffing, unsafe patient loads,” Hadwan said.
A female nurse can be heard adding, “25 patients to one nurse.”
The nurses, who appeared in good spirits joked around, while Hadwan reported back on the number of people watching his video, “Hey, I’ve got 25 people watching!” he exclaimed.
“Sinai Hospital decided to tell us to leave because we were understaffed. This is the amount of nurses we have for the night staff. 1,2,3,4,5,6—7 but one is on orientation. Multiple vents. So, everybody left—so, we were told to basically leave.
Hadwan told his Facebook viewers about how they all walked out and left the day shift to cover for them, saying: “Now they have day-shift nurses who’ve been there since 7 am—still in there—all because they said we can’t have, we’re not getting any more staff tonight.”
Multiple times, the night shift nurses can be heard asking if the day shift nurses are coming out to join them and abandon the patients.
Hadwan explained to his Facebook friends, “Sanai-Grace is at the epicenter of this coronavirus. We’ve had 3 straight weeks with over 110 patients, and an average of 12-14 nurses, and at night, that drops down to about 8nurses. And we’ve been accepting that and working hard, but tonight breaking point. We cannot safely take care of your loved ones with six, seven nurses, and multiple vents and multiple people on drips. It’s not right.”
The nurses can be heard saying they’re contacting Fox 2 News in the background. One of the nurses calls out to a night shift nurse, saying, “Ty, fight the power!”
Watch:
https://www.facebook.com/arabianking313/videos/10222759815166354/
After the nightside nurses were told to leave, the dayside nurses were told they needed to continue working — meaning they would work a 24-hour shift, according to Hadwan.
