Hawaii hospitals are full ahead of possible nurses’ strike
By Kristen Consillio
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HONOLULU, Hawaii (KITV) — As hundreds of Kapiolani Medical Center nurses prepare to strike, the already struggling health-care industry is bracing for the worst.
“Right now it is particularly acute in terms of our census levels,” said Hilton Raethel, president and CEO of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii.
Hawaii’s hospitals are already seeing an almost record number of patients — more than 2,500 — close to peak pandemic levels.
According to the Healthcare Association of Hawaii, ambulances are overwhelmed by the number of patients, many of them being delayed getting admitted into hospitals.
“When you have any type of labor incident like this, it does put pressure on the rest of the system,” Raethel said. “We don’t have spare nurses in the state that we can just pull in.”
Kapiolani Medical Center said patient care will not be disrupted because the hospital will be bringing in temporary traveling nurses.
EMS is also making contingency plans if there is a strike and at some point Kapiolani is unable to handle the volume of emergency calls.
Pediatric patients would be taken to the closest emergency room and transferred to Kapiolani if needed. Maternity patients could go to other hospitals.
“For children and complicated OB cases we usually go to Kapiolani, but again as we evaluate the situation in the ER particularly if the strike unfolds, we’ll just make our changes accordingly,” said James Ireland, director of the Honolulu Emergency Services Department.
The state is already short roughly one thousand nurses, even though it has the second-highest nursing salaries in the country at an average of $121,000 a year.
HAH said the root of the problem is the high cost of living here, and a generational shift in workers not wanting to do traditional jobs in the labor force.
Another big nursing contract is expiring in May for nurses at the Queen’s Medical Center.
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