Short Staffing
Healthcare Workers are sharing their stories of unsafe and short staffing.
Healthcare Workers are sharing their stories of unsafe and short staffing.
It's been difficult, scary and sad. Working short staffed has been awful. We don't have enough people to work and we are not getting any compensation for picking up shifts or doubling except for a voucher for a "free meal" that I still had to shell out $1.75 for. We are all burned out and it makes it difficult to provide exceptional care at times.
I really had a bad experience working during the COVID , I was sitting in 1:1for hours the hospital was under staff we didn’t have safety equipments for us do our jobs I was at high risk of be infected with the virus and my family was at risk as well,! I was surprised that Methodist hospital couldn’t keep it employee safe.
Working short staffed has been very unsafe, not only for our patients but also for each and every staff member. Working short staffed not only means unsafe work conditions but it allows for more medical errors because staff members are not only burnt out but deprived of not getting breaks, enough sleep or just can’t do it anymore, also we are not spending the correct amount of time with patients leading to a poor hospital stay.
Exhausted Frustrating being short staff overwhelming It feels like you're not giving the patients the best that they deserve, Being short staffed stretched real thin Very stressful Feeling like been unappreciated.
During COVID, I have been pulled from my home unit (NICU) many many times and floated to the ED to cover behavior health 1:1s. This is frustrating in itself because often times, NICU will go days without any CSA on the floor, and when we finally get a chance to come back, more often than not the unit is quite a "mess". I work night shift, and there's been multiple times where every available CSA in the hospital is pulled to the ED to cover these 1:1s. On a few occasions, CSAs have had to cover more than one behavior health 1:1 patient. I've had to cover 3 patients via monitor from the ED nursing desk, which is very unsafe in my opinion because if no one else is right by you, you're not allowed to leave the monitor to tend to any patient needs. This was dangerous because if a patient were to try to do something to harm them self, the response time would be delayed. I've also had to cover two behavior health 1:1 while sitting in the hallway in between the two rooms, just looking back and forth between the two rooms.
A lot of work.
