Your Job or Your Conscience?

There is a recent news story about 3 nurses in Mesquite that were fired for refusing to accept patient assignments:

Fired nurses protest at Mesquite hospital

Mesquite: Hospital defends action as ICU patient ratio debated
12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, June 16, 2007
By KIM BREEN / The Dallas Morning News
kbreen@dallasnews.com

"Three nurses who say they were fired from a Mesquite hospital after refusing what they believed was an unsafe patient load are trying to bring attention to what they consider dangerous understaffing.
Nurses Diana Sepeda, Nancy Friesen and Sandra Taylor said they were fired this month from Dallas Regional Medical Center – formerly the Medical Center of Mesquite. During a night shift in the hospital's ICU in May, each nurse refused to take on three patients because they did not think they could provide adequate care...."

The article continues with a discussion of what the nurses found, what they did, what others think they should have done and what they are doing now. One of the statements in the article references that the nurses should have invoked "Safe Harbor Peer Review" because this would protect them in the workplace and before the Board. There are multiple problems with this recommendation: Safe Harbor does not protect nurses from lawsuits; the Nurse Practice Act 303.005 also states that nurses cannot be disciplined by the Board while the Peer Review for Safe Harbor is pending, but if the Peer Review committee determines that a nurse's action does not apply or is not related to the Safe Harbor request, the nurse may be disciplined; and although the employer cannot take retaliatory action against a nurse invoking Safe Harbor, the employer tends to wait awhile and then find a reason to terminate the nurse. Safe Harbor may be helpful for nurses, but I have only seen one case where it benefited the nurse: the nurse was still terminated for her actions, but when the Board asked her during a disciplinary proceeding about Safe Harbor, she produced her copy of the form she submitted to the employer and the Board dismissed the case, but the nurse had still lost her job and the problems continued at the facility.

There are multiple problems that need to be addressed for nurses and it is very difficult to do this on your own. Please join nursing associations and then push the associations towards the issues that concern you. See my discussion on why nurses should join nursing associations. This is the only way nurses are going to gain the power required to enact change; nurses must join together and demand better conditions to improve patient safety.