Nurses at DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit voiced their opinions on April 5 about the dangerous working conditions they have been dealing with in caring for COVID-19 patients.
Hospitals throughout Michigan are short on staff due to nurses who have quit and those who have fallen ill with the new coronavirus, and it has led the few nurses that remain to have growing concerns. Each nurse often has to care for a dozen patients at once, all while exposing themselves and their other patients to COVID-19.
“I voiced my concern loud and clear that day, like this is ridiculous,” Kenisa Barkai told the Detroit Free Press. “… I can't be [in] 100 places at one time. I was already overwhelmed and overworked. You know, we don't get to take breaks. We don't get to go to the bathroom. And with COVID patients, it's not just like, you're able to go in and out of the room — you have to take a lot of steps to protect yourself, right?”
Barkai voiced her concerns on March 27, which led her to being fired from her nursing position at Sinai-Grace.
But on April 5, several other nurses said they had reached a breaking point.
"Tonight, it was the breaking point for us because we cannot take care of your loved ones out here with just six or seven nurses and multiple vents (ventilators), multiple people on drips," Salah Hadwan, registered nurse in the emergency department at Sinai-Grace, told the Detroit Free Press. "There would have been nurses that had to watch up to 20 patients at a time, which is not safe."
The nurses asked managers to call in more staff to help work the night shift on April 5, but after four hours, Hadwan said managers asked what the nurses were going to do. They told the managers they were taking a stand. Managers then told the nurses, "You can leave," Hadwan told the Detroit Free Press.
But Hadwan still urges everyone to stay home to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.
"People are dying in large amounts. Please stay home, please. If everybody stayed home for two weeks, you know, we could be saving each other just by doing that. We have to take it seriously," Hadwan told the Detroit Free Press. "If only they could see what we see. There's no words to describe it."
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