Cathy Talbott of the People’s Tribune interviewed Trisha Springstead, R.N., Panacea, Florida, on her experiences working with Covid-19 patients in today’s failing healthcare system. This is Part One.
“When I first started nursing in California, a lot of the hospitals were run by the state or state funded community hospitals. Now almost all nursing homes are run by corporations. Big corporations are buying up hospitals. And they’re making more demands on less staffing.
“Legislatively, we’re not in touch with what’s going on. It used to be you could call a doctor and actually communicate with them. There was a lot of education and recruiting of nurses. Staffing was better; food was better, etc. Then regulations were required that you had to prove to insurance companies that any procedure was necessary instead of it being included in the diagnosis. Now we’re waking up and realizing this system isn’t working. A lot of this started under Reagan. When corporations took over, they demanded we do more with less. It used to be that the supplies needed for a patient’s care were included in their diagnosis. Now, every pill has to be paid for, and that jacks up costs.
“They’ve thrown nurses to the wolves. Staffing is at a bare minimum. Nurses are burning out because the corporations don’t care what they’re going through. They’re trying to squash unions as nurses are trying to unionize.
“I’ve been at three nursing home facilities, one in Maryland, another in Massachusetts and now in Florida, since the pandemic hit. They were not ready for this. If a nurse is sick, they have no back-up. In Maryland, I walked into the facility for my day-shift and found one aide asleep at a desk. No nurses showed up for the night shift. Nobody had gotten their meds, no wound care, nothing. I walked into death. [There were deceased patients in their rooms.] And if you say something, you’re the troublemaker. Since we’ve turned these into corporate owned facilities, it’s all about “heads in the beds,” the money!
“Nurses are telling me they weren’t prepared. They didn’t have the staff-no disaster plan. This was a huge corporate owned facility that makes billions a year but where was the Director of Nursing? They have a lot of ancillary staff but they let that unit sit without any staffing! So Covid spread like wildfire! They cut workers to the bare bones!
“What we need to do is shift to Medicare for All from Womb to Tomb so we can get appropriate care. Doctors might make less, say $300,000/year (I think they can live on that), and nurses more, and we’ll get more nursing staff. If we don’t change this corporate structure of healthcare more will die needlessly.”
