National Nurses United

Grady:FINAL 7/3/08 1:25 PM Page 15 A nurse at Grady Health System explains how a starvation diet of funds and unrelenting corporate pressure forced Georgia's biggest public hospital to go private this year. Is there hope for public institutions like Grady? by rita valenti, rn ZUMA PRESS / NEWSCOM; OPPOSITE: AP PHOTO/JOHN AMIS A fter more than a century as a county hospital and one of the country's last large public health institutions, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Ga. was privatized in May. Previously, citizens of DeKalb and Fulton counties could at least, in theory, hold the hospital authority accountable through the elected county commissioners, who appointed its members. Now the operations of a safety-net hospital upon which millions of greater Atlanta residents depend each year will be overseen by a private, nonprofit board that chooses its own members and conducts its business beyond the public eye. To observers who believe that healthcare is a basic right and support public efforts to provide it—people like me, a 21-year Grady registered nurse—the battle to save Grady as a public hospital was doomed before it began. Though it had managed to survive for 116 years, Grady in recent years became so financially vulnerable as a direct result of our failed healthcare system that powerful, private, neo-liberal influences grabbed their chance to swoop in and seize it for themselves. Though Grady remains open and serving the same population for now, the track record for large public hospitals is not promising. Los Angeles County's KingDrew Hospital, New Orleans' Charity Hospital, Philadelphia General, DC General, and others have all been swept away in the past few decades. Grady's future is tenuous at best. What the lesson of Grady shows us is that though this particular fight has been lost, the war to secure a lasting solution for equal, quality access to healthcare for all can no longer be waged as if it were a vision for the future. The future is now, and if we are ever to fulfill the caring mission of great institutions like Grady, the solution must be single-payer national healthcare for all. rady's very existence was premised on the economic and social inequality of our healthcare system. It was founded in 1892 to provide healthcare for lowincome families in Atlanta and today largely serves as a "safety-net" hospital for the uninsured and underinsured. Segregated from inception, the second large expansion of Grady in 1954 built 21 floors with 1,100 beds and 17 operating rooms in the form of an "H," with one wing for black patients and the other for white. Even though the wings were technically one building, they were dubbed "the Gradys," an expression that lasts to this day. Grady once housed two nursing schools, one white and one black. It was not until 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, that the schools merged. Those same student nurses desegregated the "H" by moving the beds of all male patients to one wing and female patients to the other in that same year. Nurses working at Grady are of the same mold as nurses with Cook County of Chicago, Parkland of Texas, or any other small handful of tough, "doing-more-withless" healthcare providers at the dwindling numbers of legendary public county or municipal hospitals across the country. Emory University began using Grady as a teaching hospital in 1915 after it acquired the Atlanta Medical Col- G ETAKEOVER JUNE 2008 W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G REGISTERED NURSE 15

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