Pocono Record
AP
A nurse dons personal protective equipment before the opening of a temporary coronavirus testing facility in Las Vegas in 2020.
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Nurses and health professionals from across the Poconos gathered together to remember those lives lost to the pandemic, and to call for action to prevent the loss of even more patients in the future on Tuesday afternoon.
As part of Nurses Week 2021, a vigil for patient safety honoring the thousands of Pennsylvanians lost to covid-19 was held in Dansbury Park in East Stroudsburg, one of many such gatherings that were hosted across the nation throughout the week.
How much can one nurse take on while still providing the best possible care for his or her patients?
Though the issue of safe nurse-to-patient ratios the number of patients a nurse has under direct care has been a hot button issue for the medical community for years. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it elevated to an unprecedented level, nurses say.
They say hospitals have hit, and at some times exceeded, capacity limits with patients carrying a highly communicable disease, testing the limits of nurses abilities.
As more and more nurses are facing burnout and difficulty in providing proper care as they are overwhelmed with far too many patients, workers, unions, legislators, allies and others have called on health systems to ensure that staffing ratios are a guarantee for the nursing community in the commonwealth.
Negotiations between JNESO and Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono have come to a conclusion, and while a new contract has been ratified, the fight for nurses’ rights is far from over.
After weeks of negotiation reaching back to the end of December, health care union JNESO, which represents the nurses of LVH-Pocono, was able to come to a new three-year contract agreement with the hospital on Feb. 11.
AnnMarie Ruggiero, a registered nurse in the cardiovascular telemetry unit and president of LVH-Pocono’s JNESO chapter, noted that the dialogue between the union and LVHN officials had been “spirited,” with the nurses’ representatives fighting to secure a wealth of proposals made all the more necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic.