Registered nurses will stand outside Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs Wednesday to raise awareness about what they claim to be chronic under-staffing and high turnover rates at the Tenet Healthcare-owned hospital.
Beyond Palm Springs, registered nurses at eight other Tenet hospitals in California are organizing informational pickets or taking other similar public actions — in Joshua Tree, Los Alamitos, Manteca, Modesto, San Luis Obispo, San Ramon, Templeton and Turlock, according to California Nurses Association/National Nurses United, which represents about 3,700 RNs at the facilities.
“For the past two years, Tenet Healthcare has failed to prepare for the pandemic, prioritizing its profits over its responsibility to provide safe patient care,” Laura Bruce, a registered nurse at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, said in a statement released by the union.
Officials with Tenet Healthcare Corp. — a multinational healthcare services company based in Dallas that operates 65 hospitals and over 450 healthcare facilities — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Desert Regional Medical Center has lost 137 nurses since the pandemic started, according to the union, which claims a high percentage of nurses who were hired between 2019 and 2021 quit due to unsustainable workplace conditions.
The unions also accuse Tenet hospitals of mishandling rest and meal breaks and opting to pay nurses penalty pay to sacrifice their breaks instead of hiring more nurses.
Intensive care unit nurses had assignments of up to four patients, when the state’s safe staffing ratios laws state they should have a maximum of two patients, according to union representatives, who also said telemetry unit nurses had assignments of up to six patients when they should have a maximum of four.
Registered nurses are demanding that Tenet hospitals hire more nurses, Bruce said.
“We demand that Tenet comply with state hospital staffing laws by taking immediate action to retain and recruit the staff we need to provide quality care. They have the resources,” Bruce said.