National Nurses United

A t the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the dearth of and rationing by managers of per- sonal protective equipment (PPE), such as N95 respirators, forced registered nurses like Pascaline Muhindura to adapt to dangerous PPE reuse policies at their hospitals. Before Covid hit, Muhindura and nurses across the entire country would have faced discipline for not immedi- ately disposing of a respirator after every patient encounter. But at the height of the pandemic's first wave in March, hospital management where she works at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo. gathered and locked up all the N95s, then began rationing them. Nurses were being directed by hospital management to not just reuse an N95 for an entire or multiple shifts, but to wear it while going into and out of Covid- positive and Covid-negative or rule-out patients' rooms. An NNU report released March 10 found that a total of 81 percent of nurses who responded said they were forced to reuse sin- gle-use PPE, which was practically unchanged from the more than 80 percent who reported having to do so in the union's November survey. This unsettling crisis standard of care spurred Muhindura and her fellow registered nurses at Research Medical to host protests and other coordinated actions to condemn what they described as con- ditions that endanger the safety of patients and health care workers. Every nurse and health care worker on her ICU step-down unit has contracted Covid-19 and her colleague Celia Yap-Banago died of it, Muhindura testified in March 2021 to a Congressional committee. After a year of protest and now a plentiful domestic and global supply of N95s, the nurses forced administrators of the HCA-run facility to retract its PPE reuse mandates. The reversal was a win, but for many nurses, reusing PPE has been a hard habit to break. Nurses have been traumatized for so long by the PPE scarcity men- tality that they must actively, consciously work to return to pre-pandemic infection control protocols. "You have to retrain your brain," said Muhindura. "We have been brainwashed for the last year, but now we have enough PPE on the floor. I am not doing the 12-hour shift with a single mask. I changed [my thinking] and I grab more as I need." Despite the change in policies, widespread scientific recognition that Covid-19 is an aero- sol transmissible disease, and the current market glut of N95 respirators, Research Medical and other hospitals across the country still are not instituting rigorous, pre-pandemic single-use PPE standards nor widely publiciz- ing to nurses that they can return to using new PPE after every patient contact. In fact, Muhindura testified that some nurses are still pressured by managers to use the same PPE for an entire 12-hour shift and the hospital still recommends that nurses use only surgical masks with Covid patients. Nurses know that their facilities have not vigorously implemented single-use N95 standards for one reason alone: money. "The policy of reusing masks or extended use of masks is so management can save money," said Deborah Burger, RN and a president of National Nurses United. "Even if you save 50 cents an hour on these masks, it adds up to millions of dollars in profits they can place back in their pockets." And employers are still able to shirk single-use PPE standards because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has, as of press time, failed to implement a national, enforceable emergency temporary standard to protect workers A P R I L | M AY | J U N E 2 0 2 1 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 N A T I O N A L N U R S E 15 New Habits Die Hard NNU nurses across the country campaign and struggle to reclaim proper infection control practices for single-use PPE. By Ty Richardson

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