Kapiolani Medical Center nurses launch week-long strike
By Eric Naktin
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HONOLULU (KITV) — Roughly 600 nurses at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children walked off the job and launched a week-long strike on Sunday.
Family Birth Center RN Paulette Vasu with Kapiolani Medical Center told Island News, “It’s very hard because we’re caring and we care about our patients and we worry about or patients.”
Administrators at Kapiolani, part of the Hawaii Pacific Health network of hospitals, hired traveling nurses experienced in maternity and pediatric care to fill in.
At a news conference on Sunday, Kapiolani Medical Center Chief Operating Officer Gidget Ruscetta said, “When the last shift of nurses left – our unionized nurses left the building, we then brought our temporary nurses in and we were able to get them up to our units and they met with the transition team on the units, they met the families, they met the patients.”
“They have come from some of the top children’s hospitals around the country”, added Ruscetta.
Nurses voted to move forward with the strike after contract negotiations broke down between the nurses union and the hospital.
Vasu said, “It’s like they’re just wanting what they want and not listening to nurses.”
The number or patients assigned to each nurse remains one of the biggest dilemmas.
Kapiolani nurse Anasofia Vu told Island News, “There are times I have to take on my co-workers assignment as well as my own and that can mean up to 16 patients – even for like a half-hour I feel like that’s very unsafe.”
Ruscetta stated, “In our proposal to the union, we have put on the table what’s called staffing guidelines, the union has put on the table a hard ratio, when you look at this, the majority of which, we are in alignment with the nurses, what we are wanting here at Kapiolani and our nurse leaders need for our patients is the ability to look at the types of patients we have here in the medical center and then we need to be able to bring in additional nurses when we need them to provide the care necessary for our patients without delay.”
“When you have a hard ratio you need to have the nurses present before you can move a patient, and multiple times during the day we have babies being born, we have critical patients, we have surgeries and we are needing to move patients to what’s called a different level of care – this affords us that ability to do that”, added Ruscetta.
Nurses will go back to the bargaining table at the end of the month, if there’s no resolution, another strike in the near future is possible.
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