This weekend, dozens of nurses from Steward Quincy Medical Center were out in their community meeting with the public and distributing leaflets detailing their serious concerns about unsafe staffing conditions at the facility and their need for improvements in these conditions to ensure quality patient care. Nurses were at local shopping centers, T stations and other highly trafficked locations, where they received a very positive response from the public, handing out thousands of leaflets. Below is the text from the leaflet:
A Message to Our Community from the Nurses at Steward Quincy Medical Center
For nurses, working in a hospital is more than just a job. It comes with a sacred duty to our patients to provide the best care possible. That includes the duty to speak out when we believe our patients’ well being may be at risk. We are so severely under-staffed at Quincy Medical Center that nurses believe this is the time for us to speak out:
• Registered nurse staffing at Quincy Medical Center is at a bare bones level, forcing nurses to care for too many patients at one time, which may compromise our ability to provide safe patient care.
• At the same time, there is not enough non-RN technical and support staff to provide the care our patients deserve.
• RNs have submitted more than 125 official written reports of unsafe staffing incidents to management in 2012.
• Our community hospital is now owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a multi-billion dollar private equity investment firm. Health care staffing decisions are now being made at the corporate level driven by the profit motive, and not at the local level based on the needs of our patients and community.
• There is no medical justification for this level of staffing. In fact, the only reason management has provided is that staffing costs money.
This is our community hospital. We are proud to be RNs at Quincy Medical Center and we are committed to its future success. We ask for your support to ensure that you and all our families receive the safe, quality care patients deserve.
Call Quincy Medical Center at 617- 773-6100 x4012 or email Daniel.Knell@steward.org and tell him to listen to his own staff! No hospital can ethically increase its profit by putting patients at risk by failing to provide enough staff.
Download a PDF from the event: files/file/QMC 05 Safe Staffing Community Eng Chinese.pdf
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