Wednesday, March 26, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Several out-of-town nurses who came to Las Vegas to tour Columbia Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center's patient-care floors expressed outrage at being shown nonmedical areas and not being allowed to talk to the nursing staff.
"We wanted to see labor and delivery rooms, intensive-care units, medical surgical floors, pediatric floors, to find out if staffing levels were adequate and if nurses had enough supplies," said Cheryl Ross, a registered nurse at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I. "These are all important questions to compare a nonprofit hospital to a for-profit hospital."
In a letter dated March 14, Ross had written to Sunrise Chief Executive Officer and President Mitch Mitchell requesting a tour of the hospital on Monday afternoon. She said her hospital was considering a sale or partnership with Columbia and that the community felt the purchase might not be in its best interests.
When Ross and the other nurses, who were brought to Las Vegas by the Service Employees International Union, didn't receive a response, they decided to show up at Sunrise at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
"The letter was not stamped or mailed and was requesting a tour in the afternoon," said Ann Lynch, director of marketing and community relations at Sunrise. "My anticipation was that we would have one (nurse) in the afternoon."
Lynch added that the hospital rarely gives tours above the first floor. Only visiting foreign doctors are sometimes allowed onto the patients' floors, she said.
"Our concern is not for the people who want to see the floors," Lynch said. "It's for the patients who have a right not to be disturbed."
Lynch said if the nurses had requested in writing to see specific floors and units, she could have arranged that. But she said she would have needed several weeks in advance to make arrangements.
"We never heard from them (Sunrise)," said Adair Dammann, SEIU health care campaign director. "We had to pick a time and place, and so we did."
Visiting nurses were shown administration offices, the cafeteria, main lobby, gift shop, emergency-room waiting area and certain areas -- such as the radiology department -- from the hallway.
In comparison, the nurses visited University Medical Center on Monday and toured all the nursing units, labor and delivery, neonatal, the trauma center, emergency room and burn unit.
"It seemed nervous to me here (at Sunrise)," said Jane Letteney, a nurse at Leonard Morse Hospital in Natick, Mass. "It didn't seem open. It felt like there wasn't a lot of pride in showing us their patient-care floors. We wanted to talk to the nurses and get a feeling of how nurses felt about their work. We wanted to get a sense of the patient/RN ratio.
"We had a wonderful tour of UMC. There was a real feeling of spirit and pride in what they do. We met a lot of nurses in the hallway, and they were very open."
SEIU is in the process of trying to organize nurses at Sunrise. It already represents health care workers at Desert Springs Hospital and University Medical Center.
Dr. Frank Nemec, chief of staff at Sunrise, answered several of the nurses' concerns in an impromptu meeting outside the hospital's main entrance Tuesday afternoon. He said the hospital is under constant pressure to save money, and in some instances staffs have been downsized in areas that could sustain reductions.
"We are trying to pack a lot of care in a short amount of time, so hospital stays aren't long," Nemec said of the trend in managed care today.
This has resulted in too many tests being done in less time without a sufficient nursing staff to assist, he said. Many times, he added, he keeps patients on intensive-care floors because there aren't enough nurses on the less-severe intermediate floors.
"We don't have enough IV (intravenous) pumps, and we run out of supplies all the time," said Jerrilynn Woolston, an RN at Sunrise. "Once we had to send someone to (Columbia) Mountain View for urgently needed blood transfusion tubing."
archive
