"Right now, nurses don’t feel like heroes, we feel expendable.”
For weeks, Kelly Stanton wasn’t sleeping. She lay in bed gripped with the anxiety of having to go to work at a Washington, D.C.-area hospital not knowing if she might bring home the coronavirus to her husband and their three children.Stanton, a veteran nurse of 28 years, had seen federal safety protocols for health care workers begin to crumble amid the global pandemic by early March.
As COVID-19 has infected more than one million Americans, nurses working on the front lines of the pandemic with little protective support have made the gut-wrenching decision to step away from their jobs, saying they were ill-equipped and unable to fight the disease and feared not only for their own safety but also for that of their families.
“Things they were telling us we had to now do, you would’ve been fired if we did that three weeks before,” Stanton said. “How is this suddenly OK?” Since data collection has been slow and not comprehensive, and many people with COVID-19 have been asymptomatic, actual numbers are likely much higher. Nurses have a duty to their patients but they also have a duty to themselves under the nursing code of ethics, Stokes said.These are equal obligations, and if you feel morally torn you have to make the decision that’s right for you, she said.
Masks were rationed to one per week and sometimes shared between personnel. Only nurses who dealt with patients who tested positive for COVID-19 were given an extra N95 mask, even if the patient showed symptoms. “We didn’t sign up to be sacrificial lambs. We didn't sign up to fight a deadly disease without adequate resources.”
Among other things, the lawsuits call out the state for not providing appropriate PPEs for nurses, not properly training nurses deployed from hospital units, and inadequate provision of safe working conditions for high-risk employees. “They didn't sign up to go into work and be unprotected from an invisible enemy, and the pressure is really starting to mount for a lot of nurses,” Lunsford said.
“I’ve realized that I’m very fortunate that I had a choice,” she said. “A lot of nurses have student loans, car loans, and they are single parents. They can't quit, and that bothers me because they are being taken advantage of right now.”Kate, who didn’t want her full name used for privacy, quit her job at a Virginia hospital in April after she was pulled from her floor as a post-anesthesia care unit nurse and reassigned to critical care after only four hours of training.
Had masks been available and pre-pandemic precautions preserved,"without a doubt I’d still be working," Kate said.
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