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Bangor Nurses Call For Stronger COVID-19 Protections

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.

Ed is a Maine native who spent his early childhood in Livermore Falls before moving to Farmington. He graduated from Mount Blue High School in 1970 before going to the University of Maine at Orono where he received his BA in speech in 1974 with a broadcast concentration. It was during that time that he first became involved with public broadcasting. He served as an intern for what was then called MPBN TV and also did volunteer work for MPBN Radio.