Nurses tell ‘Post’: If not enough nurses by winter, people will die
Even before coronavirus hit the country, Israel had one of the worst nurse-to-population ratios.
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMANNurses from Hadassah Medical Center protest against their work conditions at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem on July 20, 2020.(photo credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)
Every morning, Yehudit Isaacs leaves her home in the Shomron before 6 a.m. and drives to Laniado Medical Center in Netanya, where she serves as head nurse of the hospital’s emergency room. She said she doesn’t even see her six children, who range in age between one-and-a-half and 14, until 6 p.m., and sometimes not until after 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.The phone rings 24/7 – on Shabbat and holidays, during vacation days – with staff calling for professional advice or assistance, she explained. And since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, “it all got much worse – much, much more intense,” she told The Jerusalem Post.Yehudit IsaacsDuring the first wave, Isaacs caught coronavirus, along with her husband and four of her children.“When I got sick and had to enter isolation, it was a critical time for the hospital,” she recalled. “We were fighting the pandemic, and I found myself having to manage it all from home.”Isaacs stayed in isolation for three weeks. When she recovered, she returned to the ER frontlines immediately – leaving her sick kids at home.“I would shower before I would leave for work, and then I was instructed not to touch my kids before I came into the hospital,” Isaacs said. “When I arrived, I would change my clothes again. Only then could I see my patients.”“It was so hard to leave the sick children at home,” she recalled, “but they needed me at the hospital.”On Monday, Isaacs spoke to the Post after a 12-hour shift and on the same day that the National Association of Nurses launched a strike demanding that the country fund additional positions to help support the system through the pandemic and in general.Even before coronavirus hit the country, Israel had one of the worst nurse-to-population ratios, with five nurses per 1,000 people – a figure that is significantly lower than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 8.8. In other words, in nearly every hospital, there is a shortage in the number of nurses compared with the number of beds.
The Finance Ministry had promised hundreds of more slots for nurses, but nothing has yet to be delivered. Now, as the union’s chairwoman, Ilana Cohen, wrote in a letter to the directors of the health funds and the Health Ministry last week, the nurses are striking “out of national responsibility and in order to stop the collapse of the nursing system and save lives.”“If there are not enough nurses, then people will die,” said Rabia Salame, head nurse of the emergency department at Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.Rabia SalameThe coronavirus crisis highlighted what health professionals knew for a long time: The country had been starving the health system since the 1970s, and the situation has grown increasingly acute since then, he told the Post.Israel entered the coronavirus crisis with the highest hospital occupancy rate of any OECD country and with by far the highest number of people dying from infectious disease per capita in the developed world – 73% more than the No. 2 country, Greece.If medical staff is struggling now, in the summer, they can only predict the emergency situation in the winter, when the country is hit with the flu and coronavirus at the same time, Salame said.“If we do not prepare for the winter, it will be a catastrophe,” he stressed.His own ER needs at least 10 more full-time nurses, Salame said. Thousands are needed around the country. There are several thousand nurses about to graduate, but the hospitals cannot hire them because the government has not agreed to fund their positions, he said.Israel is out of time, Salame said.“We went and we looked for ventilators from all over the world [during the first wave],” he said. “Who will treat the patients connected to those ventilators? There is no staff to handle then, no staff that knows how to handle them.”Nurses need to be recruited now to be trained well enough to handle the expected number of acute patients, Salame said.“It is clear health professionals are not the ones making decisions,” he concluded.Hodaya Slater, who works as an emergency-room nurse at Assuta Ashdod Medical Center, expressed similar sentiments.Hodaya SlaterNurses at her hospital now work eight-hour shifts from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. – and it changes every week, she said. But during the first wave of the coronavirus crisis, the team worked in capsules and 12-hour shifts.Since the coronavirus crisis began, the staff has to wear personal protective equipment and masks during their full shifts, Slater said, adding that “it’s really not comfortable. But it is something we have to do. We cannot relax the restrictions. If people are not careful, they could get infected.”Slater is a mother of two young children, ages six and four. Since corona, she cannot freely touch her own children for fear she has been exposed to the virus.“Before I leave the hospital, I change my clothes,” she told the Post. She washes them at the hospital. When she gets home, she showers right away. “My kids know not to come near me until I shower – no hugs or kisses, nothing.”The nurses do not want to strike, Salame said, adding: “We want an agreement, and it seems like the government does not listen to anything but protests and strikes.”Soon after Salame spoke to the Post, the Health and Finance ministries approved funding an additional 2,000 nurses and 400 doctors, most of which would be available to the health system immediately.“There will be no doctor or nurse who will not be able to work during this period due to the budget,” Finance Minister Israel Katz said.Salame stressed that the nurses are not asking for money.“We do not get good salaries,” she said. “But we are talking about the positions that are lacking, not personal benefits. We are not asking for ourselves; we are asking for our patients.”Isaacs, too, said the nurses are not looking to profit from the strikes.“We chose this job because we feel like emissaries [of God],” she told the Post. “Everyone who works in the health system goes to work to save lives, to help people, to stop the suffering around them.”“We are talking about the basic ability to give our patients the services and treatments they need and deserve,” Isaacs continued. “We want the basic right to do our jobs. I hope the decision-makers understand this.”
