Tell CDPH: End waivers of safe staffing standards!

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Instead of preparing for the winter surge of Covid-19, California hospitals lobbied the California Department of Public Health for waivers of California’s landmark safe staffing law, which requires minimum levels of safe registered nurse staffing for various hospital units. Now is not the time to roll back safety standards.

Tell CDPH: Immediately rescind state authorizations of any waivers of our state’s safe staffing standards, and focus on improving safety conditions, not eliminating them!

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Frontline registered nurses and other health care workers across California have been putting our lives on the line — frequently working extra shifts and overtime without proper PPE and other protections — for 10 months as we battle Covid-19, struggling to save every life. With ongoing record numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, we face a massive crisis.
 
There could not be a worse time to be eroding the already stressed and often unsafe conditions in which we currently work. Yet, the California Department of Public Health has caved to pressure from the hospital industry and granted waivers of California’s landmark safe staffing law, which requires minimum levels of safe registered nurse staffing for various hospital units.

The winter surge we are now experiencing did not come as a surprise. Nurses urged hospitals to work with us to prepare, to plan, to make sure they had the staffing, the safety measures, and other precautions in place before the massive wave hit. Not only did they refuse, they actively laid off and furloughed staff, canceled traveling nurse contracts, failed to cancel elective procedures, stopped scheduling per diem nurses, called off nurses scheduled to work, failed to fill vacancies, and drove many nurses out of the workplace due to unsafe conditions. Now, they want the state and all Californians to bail them out from the crisis they themselves have created. And who ultimately pays for their greedy behavior? Patients and nurses.

This move to roll back safe staffing standards threatens the lives of patients and nurses all over California — especially during a pandemic. More than 72,000 health care workers have already tested positive in our state, and more than 260 have died. We know that if we are not safe, our patients are not safe.

I am writing to you today to demand that CDPH immediately rescind state authorizations of any waivers of our state’s safe staffing standards, and focus on improving safety conditions, not eliminating them. All of our lives and our patients’ lives depend on it!