Sandra Smith, Local 1001
Tacoma General Hospital
Tacoma, Washington
My name is Sandra Smith. I'm a surgical technologist at Tacoma General Hospital in Tacoma, Washington and I've been a member of UFCW Local 1001 for nine years.
It's no wonder Americans are worried about getting sick and ending up in the hospital. Big insurance companies have our health care system in a stranglehold. HMOs and big insurance keep lowering their payout to hospitals like the one I work in. The hospitals then do everything they can to cut costs to increase their bottom line.
The first thing a hospital does to reduce costs is cut the number of registered nurses on staff and replace them with lower-skilled workers?in my hospital they are called PSTs or perioperative service technicians. The hospital takes people from all parts of the workforce?housekeeping, cafeteria, orderlies?gives them minimal medical training, then puts them at the bedside working along with licenced and certified medical technicians.
Deskilling the health care workforce is a recipe for disaster. It puts patients at risk because we've got relatively unskilled workers taking care of very sick people. I feel much more stress on the job because there is no way for me to know exactly what a PST has been trained to do. Workers who are bumped into PST jobs also have a hard time. Just imagine if you were working in housekeeping and the hospital suddenly bumps you up to PST with just a few weeks of training. It's not fair to put that kind of pressure on workers. And it's certainly not right to compromise patient care by deskilling the workforce.
Hospitals deskill jobs to save money, even at the risk of lowering the quality of patient care. If health care institutions really cared about the patients and the staff, workers would do only the job they are trained and ready to perform.
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