Patients were left lying on stretchers for hours with serious, time-sensitive problems. Operations were postponed. Other patients developed pressure sores – gaping wounds that can be fatal for frail patients – because they were not moved often enough.
“You feel terrible knowing you’re not changing these patients,” says Jillian Wahlfors, a nurse at Genesys. “You know they get their meds late. You don’t have time to listen to them. They get into accidents because you can’t get in fast enough to take them to the bathroom.”
Nick Ragone, an Ascension spokesman, denied that cost cutting contributed to the staff shortage during the pandemic. Such a claim, he said, “is fundamentally misguided, misleading and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the impact of Covid-19 on healthcare workers.” He also said that Ascension offers superior care that has “improved over time” and that the hospital provides free treatment for many low-income patients.
Unlike some rivals, Ascension avoided layoffs early in the pandemic, and Mr Ragone said the chain has more employees than many of its peers. From December 2015 to June 2021, he said, the ratio of Ascension’s bedside nursing capacity to patients discharged increased by 64 percent, with headcount increasing and discharge rates remaining roughly stable.
Academics who study hospital staffing warned that the metrics make Ascension’s staffing conditions appear better than they are. For example, the increasing number of nurses in the ratio at least in part reflects that Ascension has added about 17 hospitals, while the data on discharges does not account for outpatients, even as nurses spend more and more time caring for them.
Because it is difficult for outsiders to verify such industry-supplied data, hospitals can use it for their own purposes.
“The complexity and the lack of transparency, all of these things make it impossible to try to figure out exactly what’s going on,” said Linda Aiken, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, who has conducted large surveys among hospital staff. “That’s why we ask nurses.”
