Nurses working on the unit at Bangor’s Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center, where patients with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 are cared for, are calling on the hospital make changes to better protect workers and patients.
A letter to hospital administrators requests that nurses have N95 respirators, or powered, air-purifying respirators, at all times when caring for COVID-19 patients.
“The nurses on P6 are now being told that they can only wear N95 masks for certain procedures,” says Northern Light Eastern nurse Erin Oberson, a steward with the hospital’s nurses union. “What we’re doing and what we’ve done is this ‘just in time resourcing.’ So we have just enough supplies for right now. And 3 weeks ago the world didn’t look like this.”
Oberson says, at other times, nurses are issued paper masks. The nurses also request having a respiratory therapist on the floor at all times, providing scrubs and a $1,000 annual bonus, which would bring nursing benefits in line with emergency and critical care staff.
In a statement, Northern Light Health says it subscribes to CDC guidelines and is learning from organizations already responding to large numbers of COVID-19 patients. The hospital says personal protective equipment is in short supply across the nation, but is available for staff at Northern Light Health to use when appropriate.
