Nurses in Massachusetts and across the nation are overworked, handling several patients once, and causing some to slip through the cracks. Marlena Pellegrino, co-chair of the Massachusetts Nurses Association bargaining unit told Jim Braude on Greater Boston that it has caused by hospitals trying to save money on staffing.
"The less number of nurses you have at the bedside, the more money the hospital makes and the poorer care the patient gets. And their top priority is their bottom line, it's not the safety of patients," said Pellegrino, who recently appeared in a New York Times opinion video on the subject.
Pellegrino is a nurse at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester and recently ended the longest nurses strike in the history of the state. She said nurse staffing issues in the U.S. have been going on for years and were not just prompted by the pandemic. Now, many nurses are leaving the profession.
"At a certain point when you can't put your patients first and you feel like you're doing more harm than good when you show up every day, you just cannot reconcile the ethical standard of that. So nurses will — they'll take so much and then they will move away from the bedside," said Pellegrino.
Watch: Nurses speak out against hospital greed
