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Kapiolani Hospital Nursing Strike - clearing up a few things
This post is for non nursing folks folks in Hawaii who want to understand what the Kapiolani nurses are striking for, but aren’t seeing anything in the local news due to the news blackout regarding this issue. There’re many simplistic takes out here, suffering from lack of good information.
Currently Kapiolani Women and Children’s Hospital in Hawaii is pushing for the contractural right to keep nursing staff levels such that one nurse may be assigned up to 8 patients.
Additionally, rather than committing to staffing the hospital to meet the demands of the patient census and workload, hospital management uses patient abandonment laws to force the nurses into 16 hour mandatory shifts (vs the normal 12 hr shifts).
Over the long haul under such conditions, Nursing staff burnout leads to even more staff shortages.
More immediately, there simply isn’t time in the day (or night) to accomplish all the tasks and care documentation (charting) that go with that many patients.
As a result, there will come corners that must be cut and steps that must be skipped in order to spread the care around. And inevitably, more errors will happen under these steady-state over-working conditions.
That’s where the patient safety part comes in. Patient care suffers.
Understand that all the other hospitals in the entire state, and within a thousand miles or so of ocean territories, transport their patients to Kap due to either insufficient level of ability, gear, or staff. Kapiolani is the only hospital who can’t say No to a patient transferred in from anywhere in the state, Samoa, Solomons, Micronesia, etc. Kapiolani Hospital is the “last gasp saloon” for many.
Because of this, and combined with Kapiolani’s chronic, systemic understaffing, mandatory shifts are routinely assigned to nurses at the END of their just-worked 12 hour shift. This law-backed, mandatory staffing is available to all hospitals in a desperate pinch. But it has become a go-to staffing solution by management at Kap to keep a worn-out-at-the-and-of-a-12-hour-shift nurse on their feet for 16 hours.
This state of affairs isn’t sustainable. Patient safety suffers, burnout is off the scale, and Kapiolani has been hemorrhaging experienced nurses since Covid to the present day, due to these policies.
#local
This post is for non nursing folks folks in Hawaii who want to understand what the Kapiolani nurses are striking for, but aren’t seeing anything in the local news due to the news blackout regarding this issue. There’re many simplistic takes out here, suffering from lack of good information.
Currently Kapiolani Women and Children’s Hospital in Hawaii is pushing for the contractural right to keep nursing staff levels such that one nurse may be assigned up to 8 patients.
Additionally, rather than committing to staffing the hospital to meet the demands of the patient census and workload, hospital management uses patient abandonment laws to force the nurses into 16 hour mandatory shifts (vs the normal 12 hr shifts).
Over the long haul under such conditions, Nursing staff burnout leads to even more staff shortages.
More immediately, there simply isn’t time in the day (or night) to accomplish all the tasks and care documentation (charting) that go with that many patients.
As a result, there will come corners that must be cut and steps that must be skipped in order to spread the care around. And inevitably, more errors will happen under these steady-state over-working conditions.
That’s where the patient safety part comes in. Patient care suffers.
Understand that all the other hospitals in the entire state, and within a thousand miles or so of ocean territories, transport their patients to Kap due to either insufficient level of ability, gear, or staff. Kapiolani is the only hospital who can’t say No to a patient transferred in from anywhere in the state, Samoa, Solomons, Micronesia, etc. Kapiolani Hospital is the “last gasp saloon” for many.
Because of this, and combined with Kapiolani’s chronic, systemic understaffing, mandatory shifts are routinely assigned to nurses at the END of their just-worked 12 hour shift. This law-backed, mandatory staffing is available to all hospitals in a desperate pinch. But it has become a go-to staffing solution by management at Kap to keep a worn-out-at-the-and-of-a-12-hour-shift nurse on their feet for 16 hours.
This state of affairs isn’t sustainable. Patient safety suffers, burnout is off the scale, and Kapiolani has been hemorrhaging experienced nurses since Covid to the present day, due to these policies.
#local
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