Bronx emergency room nurse Kelly Cabrera recalled the most harrowing shift of her career: Alone to cope with 15 patients, crushed by another pandemic surge, without enough time to even grab a snack.
“You are forced to make the decision of who you are going to see first,” the Jacobi Medical Center employee said Thursday as the COVID-19 omicron variant continued to pummel the city. “And sometimes, by the time you come back to your patient, they’re not doing well anymore … in some situations, they’ve died.”
Cabrera was joined by co-workers, nursing colleagues and elected officials outside the Bronx hospital to raise a red flag about the dual threats putting patient lives at risk — a shortage of emergency room beds, leaving some patients in the hallways for days at a time, and a severe lack of nurses.
“People always ask me, ‘What’s the difference between this wave and the first big one?'” said Karen Lam, another Jacobi emergency room nurse. “I tell them the biggest difference between this wave and the first one is the mass exodus of nurses.
“In a pandemic where we stress social distancing, patients are lying in the hallway on stretchers that are touching each other.”
Reggie Antangan of the Queens Hospital Center Telemetry Unit said his 33-bed unit once had 18 to 20 night nurses.
That number has plunged to six full-timers as longtime employees chose to flee rather than face the overwhelming caseload, he said.
“This is the worst I’ve seen in my 15 years working here as a Health+Hospitals registered nurse,” Antangan said. “H+H has not done anything to help our nurses. COVID has once again pushed the hospital to the brink of exhaustion, and these nurses are running out the door.”
The frontline workers were joined by Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson, Assembly members Natalia Fernandez and Michael Benedetto, and City Council member Marjorie Velazquez.
Among the issues raised: Frustrated patients lashing out at overworked nurses unable to properly treat everyone in their care.
“This is a call to action for attention,” said Gibson. “Our nurses deserve better, no question. And as elected officials, it is our responsibility to give you everything you deserve.”
The city Health+Hospitals system responded Thursday with a statement praising its “heroic nurses” while detailing its plan for handling the crunch.
“We have activated many proven strategies that served us well during the first surge to help support our nurses,” the statement read.
“We have added hundreds of nurses and are adding hundreds more in the days ahead, we are transferring patients across our hospitals to balance the demand, and we are doing all we can to support the physical and emotional wellness of our front-line teams.”
Lam described the rigors of a typical 2022 shift with a reduced workforce and an increasing number of patients.
“The ER is overcrowded and its overrun,” she recounted. “We have absolutely no room. And it’s not just the ER — the hospital is packed to capacity and there are no beds available upstairs. When that happens, the patients suffer.
“When this happens, patients end up lying in the hallways for days in the ER, waiting for beds upstairs to finally open up.”
Judith Cutchin, president of the state Nurses Association, said the issued affected the facilities most like to care for the city’s needy.
“Jacobi Medical Center suffers from terribly inadequate resources in a system of gross inequality,” she said. “Public hospitals, and other safety net facilities in New York City, are the backbone of care for low-income families in particular.”
Pediatric ER nurse Sean Petty, 44, worked with the team that tried to resuscitate 12-year-old Seydou Toure after Sunday’s fatal high-rise fired. The continuing problems, he said, were beginning to wear on everyone.
“We’re all suffering from moral distress, secondary to system failure,” he said. “In the last month, we’ve had numerous days where we’ve had two- to three-hour waits just for a patient to see a nurse in triage. Twenty to 30 people at a time, just waiting so we can be sure that they don’t have something serious.”