If you had a loved one hospitalized at St. Vincent, you would want the hospital and its staff to provide that person with the best care.
Should it alarm you, then, that St. Vincent nurses in the past 15 months reported more than 1,000 incidents in which they believe inadequate staffing conditions jeopardized patient safety?
Dennis Irish, a vice president of the Vanguard Health Systems, which runs St. Vincent, said you shouldn’t be.
“The claim that the hospital is unsafe is false and is an absurdity,” he said. “By most measures, we are one of the safest hospitals in the country, and our quality of care is superior to most.”
Labor contract talks are too complex to understand most times, and this one is no different.
But while most lay people might not know the significance of a Massachusetts Nurses Association safety incident report or the value of a Thomson Reuter’s award, they can easily understand how patient care might vary, depending on how many patients a nurse is asked to care for on each shift.
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