AdamWittRN

100%. The union staff members and our state president have been huge in supporting myself and the nurses at our facility. It hasn't even been a week, but there's a lot of local media coverage and increasing pressure on politicians. The hospital was obviously not crazy about my story ending up in the NYTs. We'll keep finding ways to push.

Edit: In that regard, and it may seem like nothing, please fill out this petition: https://www.coworker.org/p/HPAECovid

Nurses are taking this very seriously. Really, everyone in the hospital is.

The problem is that the standards change from day-to-day. We initially were using only n95s (a face covering) with goggles or face shields (eye protection that goes from your forehead to around your chin).

Then it went to surgical masks (a downgrade) with goggles/face shields.

Then it went to surgical masks with the little piece of plastic that sticks up (like you see in the dentist's office).

Now staff is being told to reuse their masks for multiple shifts. The N95s are locked in the manager's office on many units.

That's really nice of you to say. Honestly, I feel like I'm just doing what I'm supposed to be doing as a local president. I am far from perfect, and sometimes it's hard to keep up with all the issues, but I try to make sure that I'm looking out for everyone. More importantly, I want the nurses and all the staff to recognize their own strength and look out for each other.

Edit: There's a group of four other nurses on our board, and each of them is incredible. It would be terrible of me to not acknowledge all that they do.

I guess when they unrolled our new payroll system in April (which was screwed up and had me missing almost $2000 due to error upon error), the PTO system also wasn't tracking our time off properly. But we also had a new way of earning our PTO, so it was confusing. They conducted an audit, without any notice, and suddenly everyone's numbers went down. One week it said I had 72 hours. The next week it said -111 (I didn't have -111). The response from HR was that individual staff members had to sort through and figure out the mistakes that the audit had created. This was a few weeks ago, when our minds were sort of preoccupied with a pandemic.

Fired doesn't mean gone forever. The case against me is built on nonsense. I'll very likely get my job back, but there are some steps to do that. This just happened five days ago. And I'm still the union president.