National Nurses United

"My colleagues and I don't work on a Covid floor, so we were not provided with the strongest levels of PPE," said Hamilton, who is 29 and whose only preexisting health condition is mild asthma. "At the beginning of March, I became ill. I tried to get a test and was denied several times and when I was finally tested, the results came back that I had Covid-19 … I live in a full house. It was a scary time being isolated in a separate room. I felt terrified the entire time that my friends and loved ones would get infected." Hamilton eventually recovered and returned to work, but her struggle, along with coworkers, continued there. Her hospital rolled out reprocessed N95 respirator masks supposedly "decontaminated" through the Battelle system, but the nurses were alarmed because they immediately noticed that the fit of the masks had changed—plus NNU warned that these reprocessed masks were neither proven safe nor effective. Together as a union, Hamilton and her colleagues objected to the Battelle masks. Now nurses are provided single-use N95s when requested and usage of the Battelle masks is voluntary. "The martyrdom we take on as nurses, as women, and myself as a woman of color—we must end that," said Hamilton to Dr. Biden. "We feel scared for our patients, ourselves, our communities, and we are resolved to tell the truth about the realities of this pandemic. Alongside my fellow union nurses, we channeled our frustration and commit- ment to our patients into a fight-back against hospital practices." The other nurses on the roundtable call echoed much of what Hamilton covered. They also had difficulty accessing needed PPE, including impermeable gowns and other equipment, were con- cerned that both nurses and patients were not being tested, and were distraught over the unsafe staffing levels hospitals were trying to impose on the RNs. RN Christine Valenzuela, who works with Hamilton, explained how Covid has just "magnified" longstanding understaffing prob- lems at their hospital. "The high acuity of the patients combined with the time that it takes to take care of them—everything from chemically paralyzing them, proning them…to donning and doffing the PPE all night long—means being short staffed makes it so much more difficult to safely do our jobs and provide optimal care to our patients," said Valenzuela. She went on to describe how the PPE supply person for her unit was once 40 minutes late as one of her patients coded, so she still had no respirator. "We had to scramble very quickly and have another nurse with a respirator to go in to save the patient. I have been a nurse for 13 years and have NEVER experienced this, where everyone's safety is at risk because we can't easily retrieve a respirator when we need it." All the myriad problems the nurses raised during the roundtable were the same their NNU colleagues struggled and continue to struggle with across the country. Accessing optimal PPE is an ongoing fight for almost all nurses. Like Hamilton and Valenzuela, the nurses at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. also protested the imposition of used, chemically treated Battelle N95 masks on them. In July, they held a public protest to alert the media and community about this unproven practice. "I feel like we are being experimented on when we are told to use these processed N95s," said Erica Jones, RN. She noted that when she was forced to reuse a processed, soiled N95 respirator mask, she suffered several asthma attacks. "I started wheezing, coughing, I had shortness of breath, and chest tightness. I had to use my inhaler five times; usually I don't use it at all." After the nurses objected, Washington Hospital Center "paused" the Bat- telle program in favor of other alternatives. At Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., nurses were forced to choose between turning a used mask in daily for "decon- tamination" and reuse, or to cycle through five masks 25 times each, with the masks to be stored in five separate brown paper bags. Research nurses, along with nurses at other HCA-owned hospitals in Florida, Kansas, and Nevada, protested the chain's use of "decon- taminated" masks in late August. Fighting back works: Nurses at all the hospitals who participated in the protests were successful in get- ting management to abandon "decontamination." Earlier that month, NNU's health and safety department had released an evaluation of the available scientific literature on "decontaminated" masks and concluded that none of the methods were safe nor effective, and in some cases appeared to be ineffective, to damage respirators, and to pose a hazard to the wearer. Instead of reusing N95s or resorting to "decontamination," NNU is encourag- ing employers to adopt the use of elastomeric respirators and more powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs), which provide even 14 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0 "The martyrdom we take on as nurses, as women, and myself as a woman of color—we must end that. We feel scared for our patients, ourselves, our communities, and we are resolved to tell the truth about the realities of this pandemic. Alongside my fellow union nurses, we channeled our frustration and commitment to our patients into a fight-back against hospital practices."

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