The nurses at St. Mary came out swinging to alert the community to Trinity’s intent on reducing staff--and risking patient outcomes— in the middle of a pandemic with an info picket on July 30.
CRITICAL UPDATE Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals
September 2020
Inside the COVID-19 Crisis in Pennsylvania On the front lines of the pandemic, pushing for PPE in the early months and fighting for safe staffing now. On March 7th, with Gov. Tom Wolf’s announcement of two presumptive positive cases of COVID-19 in the commonwealth, the pandemic officially hit Pennsylvania. Six months and more than 128,000 cases later, the virus is still very much with us. Approximately 6 percent of positive cases in Pennsylvania have been in healthcare workers, some of whom died in the very hospitals where they contracted the virus. In the early months of the pandemic as case numbers rose exponentially, hospitals in crisis mode severely rationed PPE and abandoned long held policies to protect both healthcare professionals and patients. Now, as hospitals plead
post-COVID poverty, many facilities are either threatening to lay off staff or have done so already, further burdening staff ahead of what is sure to be a second wave and highlighting the urgent need for safe staffing grids in our hospitals. Our story of the COVID-19 pandemic mirrors the story of the labor movement itself—they’re both, at their hearts, about people coming together under great adversity to make their lives better. On June 10, after repeated urging from us during the initial wave of the pandemic and the very real threat of a picket at his home (see the “Speaking Truth to Power” timeline, beginning on page 2), Gov. Wolf finally forced hospitals in the
“Our story of the COVID-19 pandemic mirrors the story of the labor movement itself— they’re both, at their hearts, about people coming together under great adversity to make their lives better.”
continued on next page