Nurses say that Garfield’s parent company AHMC has ignored nurses’ contract proposals designed to protect patients.

Pasadena, CA - Registered Nurses from Garfield Medical Center held a picket and rally outside the hospital today to call attention to management cutting corners on safe patient care. Hospital management assigns nurses outside of their home units regardless of whether nurses have the appropriate level of familiarity with the unit they are assigned to work in. Nurses said that different types of patients, especially the most vulnerable critical patients, require highly specialized care, and that the hospital must properly orient nurses to avoid tragic outcomes. The practice of assigning nurses to work in areas where they have less experience – termed “floating” in the industry, can be done safely if sufficient training is provided nurses beforehand, and if nurses are re-oriented after prolonged absence from less-familiar work areas. Nurses hope to rally public support to press hospital management to commit to more frequent re-orientation of nurses, and a bar on the newest nurses having to float to other units.

Garfield Medical Center is owned by AHMC Healthcare, Inc., which owns nine California healthcare facilities, five of which are in the Los Angeles area.

“Nurses come to Garfield because we want to provide the best patient care possible for our local community,” said Jennifer Huynh, a Registered Nurse who was born at the hospital and returned to work in the hospital’s Emergency Department to serve the community that raised her. “But nurses, who are normally very confident, are scared to work in our ER. The hospital is having trouble keeping both experienced and new nurses because they are assigning them to tasks they haven’t been trained to do. That’s stressful for nurses, and it’s outright dangerous for patients.”

In addition to demands for safe floating, nurses also call for a commitment from the hospital to provide PPE in the event of a major health emergency, such as a pandemic, as well as stronger measures to address workplace violence, and an end to the potentially unsafe practice of admitting patients to the hospital while they are “boarded” in the ER, where the patients are cared for by ER nurses, rather than by nurses specializing in the patients’ particular conditions.

Photos from the Nurses’ picket action may be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wVf7cDZCfShSVCZnv4wDelZjT8xYkV1n/view?usp=share_link

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SEIU Local 121RN represents registered nurses and other healthcare professionals in California. This member-led organization is committed to supporting optimum working conditions that allow nurses to provide quality patient care and safety.