Source: Labor Notes

I am a registered nurse at Cook County Hospital, the safety-net hospital in Chicago and the busiest hospital in the state. The people who come to this hospital are some of the most underserved patients, mainly people of color, immigrants—many undocumented, the uninsured and underinsured, the homeless, and the incarcerated. Our emergency room denies no one care and about 300 people per day come there for treatment.

We have yet to become a COVID-19 “hot spot” but my co-workers all know it’s coming. Nurses know our patients will be some of the hardest hit.

Already my hospital has changed drastically. We now have a whole section of the emergency room for COVID-19 patients, with isolation rooms. The critical care areas (for the severely ill) and the medical surgical units (for the less ill), where I work, also have COVID-19-only areas.

Nurses and other hospital staff are being exposed, showing symptoms, being tested, and being quarantined. The hospital says at least a dozen have been quarantined but my union, National Nurses United, estimates the count is higher.

JUST-IN-TIME TRAINING

With nurses out sick with COVID-19, nurses from the operating and recovery rooms are being reassigned to help out in the COVID-19-only areas—the emergency room, intensive care units (ICU), and medical-surgical units. Many have not worked in these areas before and are being given “just-in-time” training. This means a nurse is oriented to the basics of each area right before being sent to work there—much like the auto industry’s model of “lean production.”

The U.S. health care system has been run this way for years before this pandemic—on the edge, with no extra staff or supplies, to guarantee maximum profits.

All this has left nurses feeling anxious and scared. Since February, our core of stewards and activists had been pressuring management through emails and meetings to demand that the optimal personal protective equipment (PPE) of N-95 masks be made readily available to us. We demanded in-person training where a qualified educator would show nurses how to correctly put on and take off the PPE and answer our questions.

Over the last several weeks, large numbers of essential workers in different industries have gone out on strike to fight for the protection they need to do their jobs safely. Nurses and health care workers also have been speaking out. We have seen story after story about the lack of PPE in hospitals. Nurses have led socially distanced protests outside of health care facilities—six feet apart—and held car protests to demand PPE.

We are trained to help our patients. We are committed to this. Nurses have not struck, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t taking collective action. Although it may seem quieter on the outside of health care facilities right now, we are fighting back daily on the inside.

NO MASKS AVAILABLE

In mid-March, nurses received messages on our union leadership WhatsApp text group that a suspected COVID-19 patient had come into our emergency room. The patient needed to be intubated, but there was a problem.

There were no N-95 masks readily available for the nurses and other workers helping this patient. They were locked up with the coordinator, under a new policy management had implemented to ration masks. This was despite stewards repeatedly demanding that upper management should make N-95s easily accessible in our locked electronic medication cabinets (Pyxis) or on a PPE cart.

If PPE had been placed in either of these locations, steps away from where COVID-19 patients were being treated, the workers helping this patient would not have been exposed.

But it’s nearly impossible to intubate a person who is struggling to breathe and page a manager to obtain an N-95 mask at the same time. Nurses, doctors, and other health care workers were exposed that day in my ER. It was criminal.

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