‘Patients over profits’: Kansas City nurses rally for better staffing at local hospitals

Several dozen nurses and supporters gathered along Meyer Boulevard outside Research Medical Center Tuesday morning, holding signs and cheering as passing cars honked their support. Their signs read, “Hey HCA: Put Patients Over Profits.”

Contract renegotiations will begin in the coming days between the nurses’ union, National Nurses United, and the for-profit healthcare giant HCA, which owns seven hospitals in the Kansas City area.

Nurses from Research’s main hospital, its psychiatric facility and Menorah Medical Center in Overland Park, expressed concerns about understaffing leading to worsening patient care. They hope to combat this trend with robust worker protections in their next contract.

“Nurses don’t want to work under these conditions anymore,” said Cheryl Rodarmel, a rehabilitation unit nurse who has worked at Research for 31 years. “Some days, I go home and feel like I could have done a much better job if I had better resources.”

HCA Healthcare, Inc. is the largest for-profit healthcare company in the United States, reporting a net income of over $5.2 billion in 2023. HCA Midwest spokesperson Christine Hamele said in a written statement on Monday that the company’s staffing levels are “safe and appropriate,” noting that both Research and Menorah have won awards for patient safety from the third-party rating organization Healthgrades.

While Healthgrades has awarded Research its Patient Safety Excellence Award for the past several years, the hospital ranks lower on a variety of patient experience factors than the national average. For instance, only 52% of patients surveyed said they “always received help quickly from hospital staff,” compared to the national average of 66%.

“In 2023, we successfully stabilized our nursing workforce by hiring 842 new staff members to our nursing organization at both Research Medical Center and Menorah Medical Center,” Hamele said.

However, according to National Nurses United, 239 nurses also left the hospitals last year — 89 from Menorah and 150 from Research.

“The people I went to school with two years ago, a handful of them are already gone from the nursing profession overall,” said Jake Liston, a nurse in Research’s Brookside emergency department and a member of the union’s bargaining committee. “They don’t feel supported, they don’t feel empowered, they don’t feel respected.”

Ariana Blockmon, who recently spent around 10 days in Research’s psychiatric unit, told The Kansas City Star that understaffing caused delays to critical services while she was a patient there. As a wheelchair user, she recalled relying on other patients to help her in and out of chairs in common areas and said that staff rarely had time to take her to a different building so she could use a wheelchair-accessible restroom.

“Everyone was just running around trying their best to take care of everyone,” she said. “Sometimes meds would be delayed for a while because there just wasn’t anyone to give them, and we’d have (patients) having panic attacks. It wasn’t the staff’s fault; there just weren’t enough people to go around.”

The nurses rallying Tuesday want HCA to maintain a two-to-one patient-to-nurse ratio in intensive care units, a three-to-one ratio in the emergency department, and a four-to-one ratio in the hospital’s other inpatient units.

Rodarmel said that chronic short-staffing has pushed these ratios up to five or six patients per nurse, with some patients left waiting for days in emergency room beds because inpatient units are so understaffed.

When National Nurses United surveyed its members working at HCA hospitals nationwide, more than two-thirds reported rarely or never taking rest or meal breaks due to understaffing.

“Somehow, the onus has been taken off of the managerial structure and put on you and your coworkers,” Liston said. “What we need in this contract is language that’s going to help us hold HCA accountable when they underserve our patients by understaffing.”

Rodarmel believes that HCA could combat understaffing by increasing wages and changing hospital leadership’s discipline-oriented approach to management. Liston agreed, calling the disciplinary culture “punitive” rather than empowering.

If the hospitals could retain experienced staff, Rodarmel believes their support and mentorship would help early-career nurses develop the skills and resilience to stay in the profession long-term as well.

“It’s always been my philosophy as a nurse that no patient should ever say to me, ‘I know you have sicker patients than me, so I’ll try not to call you,’” she said. “And we hear that all the time.”

Do you have more questions about labor conditions in the Kansas City area? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.