A band played. Speakers spoke. Crowds shouted. Big signs were brandished. The hot sun beat down on Pickett Park Saturday morning, making the couple hundred squinting onlookers look less than thrilled.
Or maybe it wasn’t the hot summer sun. Maybe it was working conditions, pay rates or the absence of a contract at the hospital across the street that had the crowd so blue. They had, after all, gathered for a funeral. They were mourning the death of health care.
The funeral’s eulogists included assemblywomen Debbie Smith and Vivian Freeman. After the speakers had finished, pallbearers marched a coffin, symbolizing health care’s demise, across the street to Washoe Health System on Ryland Street as the band played its funeral march and mourners trailed behind. The coffin came to its resting place on the building’s steps, surrounded by a mass of fed-up folks with a lot to shout about.
“[Washoe Health System] is the one that killed it. They’re the ones who are gonna bury it!”
“We’ve got the coffin where it belongs. We’re going to rescue health care!”
“This is an outrage, and all of us should be out on the streets yelling about this.”
And so they took to the street and yelled.
“The management staff makes conditions so deplorable that we’ve lost half our nurses,” said Lila Alabed, a registered nurse of 21 years who works in the cardiac intensive care ward. “They do nothing to keep us here except change the wallpaper. They need to sign our bloody contract.”
The nurses, who’ve gone on strike several times in the past year or so, complaining of unsafe nurse-patient ratios and low pay, say conditions have only gotten worse. Maureen Hoban, a registered nurse of 26 years who works in the cardiac special care ward, said she was suspended days earlier for objecting to her working conditions. She and two other registered nurses—one of whom was unfamiliar with the ward—had 29 patients to care for, a violation of Washoe Med’s standard of one nurse for every five patients. Hoban complained to management that the ward wasn’t meeting its safety standards. As a result of the conversation, she says she was suspended. “I felt like I was blindsided,” she said.
Have others been suspended as punishment?
“I could give you a list as long as that notepad of nurses who were asked to leave,” Hoban said, pointing to my reporter’s notebook. “You don’t leave a job for no reason, and some of [the nurses’ reasons for leaving] are buried in secrecy and covertness. Sabotage—it’s the way of life at Washoe.”
Linda Dee Miley and Andi Wagner, both oncology RNs, were especially upset over the employment of traveling nurses to make up for the shortage of Washoe nurses.
“When our nurses quit, they don’t hire [new permanent nurses]; they hire traveling nurses, and that’s not OK,” Wagner said. “We have lost over half our nurses.”
After the coffin had been deposited at the front door of Washoe Health System, Washoe officials began shooing folks off the steps. Anyone who happened to move from the sidewalk onto the building’s lowest step was told, under no uncertain terms, to get off the premises.
But the nurses got a warmer reception on their way back to the park. Police officers were on hand to coordinate the flow of automotive traffic and funeral foot traffic. As one tanned, mustachioed officer directed funeral-goers across Ryland Street, he extended a sincere thank you to the nurses.
“I hope you get more money. You deserve it.”