Speakers discuss health care workforce crisis: A dire shortage and getting worse

By JEFF STITT
jstitt@yourmvi.com

Dr. Theresa Brown, a registered nurse, painted a very blunt and heart-wrenching portrait of what life was like for a health care worker in an intensive care unit amid the coronavirus pandemic.
She said the pandemic caused trauma and risks for nurses and health care workers and also contributed to a figurative wound for the industry by way of a nursing shortage.
She said that wound can’t be healed by calling someone “a hero.”
Brown, author of “Shift: One Nurse, Twelve House, Four Patients’ Lives,” spoke during a state Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing Wednesday about a health care workforce crisis, and said issues with health care staffing and workers rights were brewing pre-pandemic.
The panel was led by Sen. Katie Muth, but was well represented by local officials including Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa of Forest Hills, state Rep. Austin Davis, D-McKeesport, and Sen. Jim Brewster, a Democrat from McKeesport who joined via Zoom.
Other members of the state House and Senate took part in the hearing as well, but a majority of the time was spent listening to two panels of health care workers, mental health experts and others in related fields.
The point of the hearing was to discuss the patterns of under staffing, poor pay and occupational segregation, and to deliberate on solutions for safe staffing levels, lifting wages and protections for caregivers, workplace safety, union security and positively increasing patient health outcomes.
Brown used COVID ICU experiences to illustrate that a lot is asked of health care workers and that their voice needs to be heard, they need to be fairly compensated and have benefits and protections.
“I am going to paint a mental picture of what nurses’ work was like during the pandemic,” Brown said, later saying, “As a bedside nurse, I sent one patient to the ICU because his oxygen saturation was 70% and he was turning blue — that is not a joke. Another patient’s blood pressure was too low to pump blood to his whole body, putting his organs at risk of dying. Without the tools of the ICU — ventilators, and drugs to raise blood pressure and control heart rate—those patients would have died.”
She asked the panel to imagine they were working in a “COVID ICU”
“Simply entering patients’ rooms requires an entire set of protective gear — which many hospitals either didn’t have or rationed — because the patients are contagious and put nurses at risk,” she said, later adding “The patients aren’t allowed visitors so the nurse has to be a friend, sister, husband, chaplain. When patients are dying, nurses use iPads to allow families to say goodbye.”
She said clinical recommendations called for one ICU nurse for each COVID patient. However, the usual ICU standard is one nurse for every two patients.
“So imagine you show up at work and you have two COVID patients. Meanwhile, nurses are getting sick from COVID, others are simply quitting, and the hospital is overwhelmed, so now you show up at work and have three patients, then four patients, then five,” she said, later adding that “nurses working in COVID ICUs knew that some of their patients would die because they could not care properly for them.”
Brown said “patients come to hospitals for nursing care, but squeezing nurses, expecting them to do more with less, is a time-honored way for hospitals to improve their bottom line.”
She said a nursing shortage was predicted before the pandemic. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects that almost 1.5 million registered nurse positions will need to be filled by 2029.
“If we do not fix our health care problems, nurses will quit and patients will die. Truth,” she said.
Health care and social assistance is the largest category of jobs in our country and are important to the people of Western Pennsylvania, according to Gabriel-Winant. Author of “The Next Shift: the Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in the Rust Belt.”
He said in Allegheny County, more than one in six people work in that field.
“If you drill down a level further, you’ll find that there are places where these numbers reach astonishing heights,” he said. “Here in Allegheny County, in McKeesport 26% of jobs are in health care and social assistance.”
He said 34% of jobs in Duquesne are related to health care or social assistance.
He said in terms of health care, those jobs range from doctors and nurses, to technicians, home-health aids, nursing assistants, dietary aides, environmental services workers and similar jobs.

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