Nurses sacrifice holidays to keep hospitals open

 

By Morgan Kong,
BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

A middle-aged nurse by the name of Barbara West works at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Vacaville to prepare complicated dressings for wounds.

Celia Cottle, a Davis resident and music teacher, drives to the same hospital to pick up her domestic partner from the Observation Room and take him home.

In the emergency room, a potluck featuring a Kalua pig waits in the break room for all the nurses to share.

It is Thanksgiving Day on Nov. 23, 2017, and while the rest of the country spends time with family and prepares for their Thanksgiving meals, nurses have to go to work.

Whether it is Christmas Day or a lazy Sunday afternoon, hospitals are open each day of the year, and nurses must staff it.

The necessity of keeping a hospital open at all hours of the day does not come without a price. The time that nurses spend working on holidays takes away from being with their families.

Some nurses, like Brian Baker, an emergency room nurse, feel like their family will not miss them during their shift.

“[My kids] would rather be with [their] mom,” Baker said.

Other nurses do not have relatives nearby.

“I couldn’t go home for the holidays because they’re on the East Coast,” said Paulette, who did not give her last name.

Paulette decided to work on this Thanksgiving so she could let others stay home and spend time with their families.

Sometimes there are just not enough nurses.

West, a Davis resident and wound, ostomy and continence nurse, will sometimes work to pick up the slack. She adds that hospitals will prepare to be low on help before some holidays.

“When there are big holidays they try to discharge everyone,” West said.

However, hospitals may just send these patients to nursing homes, which are also short-staffed.

Cottle and her domestic partner, Mel, are two Davis residents who have experienced these difficulties.

Cottle has been in and out of the emergency room and hospital many times when the hospital discharged Mel before he was healthy enough to go home.

“One time he was discharged Christmas Day and we were back on New Year’s Eve,” Cottle said.

Mel, who experiences congestive heart failure, even visited a nurse to alleviate the need to go to the emergency room as often as he did.

“Don’t eat salt, and weigh yourself every morning,” the nurse said.

Hospitals also receive patients with problems ranging from children putting things in their noses to patients with psych issues and hallucinations.

According to Baker, at least one person arrives in the emergency room on Thanksgiving with turkey stuck in their esophagus each year.

Working on the holidays also has its advantages.

Nurses will earn overtime pay, and a nurse who works at Kaiser Permanente earns double time and a half of their usual pay.

However, not all nurses must work on the holidays. Karen Sprague, mother of three Davis High graduates and a Davis resident, works as a family practitioner nurse at Community Medical Centers in Dixon.

Sprague works on Presidents’ Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day and the day after Thanksgiving, but she does not have to go to the hospital on the major holidays.

“It’s more like running an urgent care those days,” Sprague said.