‘Frightening’: Kansas City nurses protest lack of gear to protect against coronavirus
The off-duty nurses stood outside the emergency room entrance of Research Medical Center to survey their peers arriving for the overnight shift Wednesday evening.
They asked a small sampling of their colleagues whether they had enough personal protective equipment during this global coronavirus pandemic.
They asked if COVID-19 patients were being properly isolated in the hospital.
And they asked whether the hospital was providing adequate testing.
One by one, nurses in blue scrubs overwhelmingly agreed: No, to all of the above.
The small group of nurses from Research in Kansas City and Menorah Medical Center in Overland Park gathered Wednesday to call out their parent company, HCA Midwest Health, saying it has not properly equipped them for the fight against the new coronavirus.
They joined members of National Nurses United who work at 14 other HCA hospitals in seven states protesting this week what they call the hospital chain’s lack of preparedness.
One of their biggest concerns is a lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Nurses say they don’t have enough respirators to keep them safe while they work around infected patients. They say they are being told to reuse masks designed to be used only once.
“It goes against everything that we learned in school,” said Angela Morcha, a nurse in the medical-surgical unit at Research on East Meyer Boulevard. “I became a nurse to treat infections. I’m not afraid of infections. It’s the other stuff that’s going on that makes it really uncertain and frightening at times.”
She said the hospital was restricting nurses to one gown and mask per shift, causing widespread concern among the staff.
“A lot of anxiety,” she said. “A lot of unknowns.”
Union members took care to spread apart from each other during their demonstration outside the hospital. And they kept it to a small number to comply with local and statewide bans on gatherings of more than 10 people.
Still, several Kansas City police cruisers lined up to keep watch. Hospital security SUVs followed the demonstrators and forced news photographers off the property.
Nurses’ safety concerns
In a statement, HCA Midwest Health, one of the nation’s largest hospital chains, rebutted the complaints, saying its “emergency preparedness planning efforts started more than two months ago, and our top priority is to protect our front line clinicians and caregivers, so they are able to continue to provide high-quality care for our patients and our community now and in the future.
“This is not a time to create conflict and dissension within healthcare organizations that are doing everything possible to serve patients during an unprecedented global medical crisis and pandemic.”
“While we are aware that external organizations — including the NNU — are speaking out on issues of PPE, it is our firm belief that they are adding to the confusion, misinformation and fear spreading across the industry and public in the United States.
“This is, simply put, irresponsible. Across the globe, this pandemic has strained the worldwide supply of PPE as COVID-19 cases and utilization of PPE exceed the ability of suppliers to manufacture PPE.”
Registered nurse Angela Davis said that when she worked last weekend, two of her colleagues in the Research ICU risked being infected when a ventilator tube came detached from a patient suspected of having coronavirus.
“And of course when those come off they spray spit and other things, and this was on the clean (non-COVID) side of the ICU, so they did not have the masks on at all,” said Davis, a nurse of 15 years who lives in Blue Springs.
“I am here today to stand up for myself as well as other nurses and any other professions in here that are scared that we do not have the proper protective equipment to keep us safe during this pandemic.
“We have been having to share gowns. We are running low on gloves. We do not have enough hoods or N95s (masks) for aerosol protection.
“As much as we’ve been asking since January, they’re only as of last week starting to fit us for the N95s, and I’m still not sure how many they actually have in the hospital but they are asking us to wear one for the entire shift.”
A national shortage
These are safety concerns being voiced by health care workers across the country. On Tuesday, leaders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees painted a dire picture of working conditions in hospitals nationwide.
In a media briefing, they said health care workers are risking their lives, the lives of their patients and possibly their own families when they work without the proper gear around such a highly infectious disease.
“Our members are afraid, but they are working,” said registered nurse Denise Duncan, president of United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals.
In a dramatic image of doing more with less, a photo that went viral on social media last month shows nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, which has become an epicenter of COVID-19, wearing trash bags. “No more gowns in the whole hospital,” the Facebook post read.
A hospital spokeswoman told NBC’s “Today” show that “we always provide all our staff with the critically important PPE they need to safely do their job. If an individual does not have their proper PPE, they do not go on the floor, period. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not accurate.”
What nurses describe and what hospitals say publicly, though, doesn’t always match up.
“We’re hearing from many workers on the front lines about being asked to reuse equipment that is intended to be single use, while other workers are going out because their exposure is, quote unquote, deemed lower, even though they have patient contact,” Stacy Chamberlain, an international vice president of the national union in Portland, Oregon, said during the media briefing.
“These restrictions on equipment are because employers are worried about running out, not because they’re out right now. But they don’t know what the future looks like, or how much protective equipment they’ll be able to bring in. But this doesn’t protect workers or patients now.”
Heidi Lucas is fielding similar concerns in Missouri.
“We are hearing that even though hospitals are saying there is PPE available, and we believe them that there is PPE available, the problem is not everybody, in most facilities, who wants to wear it is being allowed to wear it,” said Lucas, state director for the Missouri Nurses Association.
Pascaline Muhindura works on an ICU unit at Research. She became concerned when it was converted to a COVID-19 unit but nurses weren’t “allowed to have N95 masks” because some of the patients weren’t sick enough to be on ventilators.
“We are concerned because there are studies that show this is airborne,” she said. “And we feel we need N95 masks on the unit. We have to push back to get N95s. We are also sharing gowns on that unit as well, nurses and physicians, one gown per room.”
“So I’m concerned because I feel like we’re not protected right now and are not getting enough supplies to keep us safe, keep the patients safe and keep the community safe.”
She has a 3-year-old and 11-year-old at home and has made plans for someone else to take care of them once she starts taking care of more COVID-19 patients because she doesn’t want to risk exposing her family.
The national shortage of protective gear has raised alarms from the American Academy of Family Physicians and the United States Conference of Mayors, which said the lack has “reached crisis proportions in cities across the country.“
Conserving supplies
Across Kansas and Missouri, hospitals have already reported shortages of masks, gowns and eye protection for health care providers. In efforts to conserve supplies, hospitals are sterilizing disposable masks and bleaching gowns — unheard of actions during regular times.
Nurses and their families have turned to scouring the shelves of Home Depot and Sherwin-Williams to find gloves, masks and respirators. Others have solicited donations on Facebook of respirators or less-than-ideal masks sewn at home.
Overland Park Regional Medical Center, an HCA hospital, recently notified nurses that it would stop stocking gowns, masks and face shields on individual hospital units.
Instead, they must check out that equipment at the beginning of each shift and return it for sterilization.
The nurses union said in a statement that it was “disappointing that in the midst of an exploding global and national pandemic that HCA Midwest Health would choose to accuse its registered nurses of spreading ‘confusion, misinformation and fear’ while they are putting their own health and safety on the front lines every day to protect HCA patients.
“What has become reported throughout the world is that nurses and other health care workers are at disproportionate risk for the novel coronavirus infection, and spreading the infection to patients, their co-workers, and their own families.
“And what has become tragically reported is that nurses and other healthcare workers, have in disproportionate numbers, become sickened with COVID-19, become patients themselves relying on ventilators to breathe, and dying.”
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 9:39 PM.