Interview with Ten Nurses from the Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio (Copy 2)

This is a wy a so community commentary area resident not the city. 30 years old. From an industrial designer now educator teaching industrial arts. OK. Procure Catholic High School in catering and I'm married to one of the nurses. Who is now in litigation with my I will consider an emergency room. I've been a nurse for about. What almost 20 years. I have five children I've been married 17 years and I live a very traditional kind of life. I'm the advocate you service bureau and I do a self awareness workshop at the Women's Center. I didn't know any of the nurses before they were fired and when I saw in the paper that they were fired I wrote a letter of support when I wrote the letter it was of support. It was because of my. Experience being a nurse and because of having strong feelings about them and what

they were doing. Bill Doyle and Roberta Fisher are friends and supporters of a group of women who have come to be known as the ten fired nurses of Dayton Ohio. The 10 were part of a group of 26 emergency room nurses who walked off their jobs a year ago at Miami Valley one of Dane's largest hospitals. After the walkout and after the reasons for their action became more clear it was evident that the nurses action had been a desperate protest against what they consider to be intolerable patient care by the hospital administration and physicians of Miami Valley Hospital. Roberta Fisher explains what happened. The nurses from Miami Valley Hospital emergency room decided after many months in fact it might even go into a year and a half that following the routine procedure of the hospital for filing complaints was not working and the only way that they could get the safety hazards changed in the Innu Minnes the inhuman practices done changed was to walk off.

And being a nurse I think I understand how that is how horrendous the problem must be. To motivate 10 women to follow this course what existed before the nurses needed. And I use the word needed because that's what they had to do. Needed to walk off was such things as women who've been raped were left for periods of hours and they were unable to get a physician to come and examine her. I'm a dislocated shoulder. And was prescribed I think. Adorable couple Dorval bills which essentially is aspirin. She could have done that at home you could have bought a couple as well. And a dislocated shoulder from my. Experience is very painful. And you don't go to emergency room to get aspirin you get emergency room to get the pain number one then to get treated for it.

In a lawsuit filed against the hospital two months after their strike the nurses listed forty five separate incidents detailing the kind of medical care patients commonly received at the hands of Emergency room doctors. In one incident the physician on duty in the emergency room could not be located to treat a teenage girl admitted with a serious scissors stab wound in the chest. The doctor said later he had been in the cafeteria and had not heard the page. Meanwhile another physician was located and the girl was operated on. But later died. The side comes home. I don't know the internal workings of the hospital. Every detail. From what I hear I have a lot of impressions of what's going on and the sad tales that came. Every night. And sometimes with tears. About their treatment of patients doctors not really caring or knockers not really knowing their medicine enough to help people. And also being charged an arm and a leg.

I was literally. For what their services were rendered. There. I guess. Maybe at least a dozen two dozen other tales of it. Not in the lawsuit. And. Some in the lawsuit I never heard of before. But. Doctors would respond to patients. The nurses would get a doctor to the blood pressure was a normal buy so much the doctors couldn't respond. And the nurses did a lot of. PR work as far as telling patients that they're going to get to them. Meanwhile are trying to find a doctor who doesn't want to be astir because he is making up bills. Are you talking to from a patient on a phone about a bill gets irate The fact that the nurse disturbed him while on the phone talking to somebody trying to get their money. M O N E Y.

Capitals for a year and a half before the nurses strike the emergency room at Miami Valley had been run under contract by an independent corporation of doctors. Their profits from his enterprise reportedly ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Dayton Daily News has since reported that this corporation known as value merchants the physicians was composed of only two doctors and that their contract with the hospital was the only one they had ever had. Valley Emergency Physicians was responsible for supplying the emergency room with the staff of physicians 24 hours a day. The necessary number of doctors were hired but most of them were foreigners who often had trouble communicating with nurses and patients. The major number of doctors would come through. Would be. Doctors from other countries who are not fluent in English. And. When you try to talk what your problem is he doesn't communicate well in English and you don't understand what he's talking about. There is a there's a large barrier there. And then when the doctor prescribes

medicine orally and the nurses don't know what he's saying. And there's the terms of the next ups and the patient doesn't know what he's supposed to do when he leaves. Because what the doctor tells him doesn't get to get across. Besides language problems the nurses charge that Miami Valley's emergency room doctors had repeatedly exhibited an insensitivity to patients needs. Another incident in the lawsuit describes a 5 year old rape victim with a large badge and a wound who waited four and a half hours before receiving anesthesia and surgery for the wound. Reportedly the child had been made to wait after she resisted doctor's attempts to inject local anesthesia directly into the wound. They were confident doctors. Would respond quickly to a patient's needs. Based on what maybe the nurse felt or what he felt. And they they wanted an administration of a hospital to respond to those needs also. And they are wanted some communication. They want to know realize that the

hospital understood that doctors understood. What the nurses were going through themselves personally. You know when you get up in the morning and you need to go to work because you know what you have to face because you face the same thing the day before the day before that six months before that a year before that. It was always the same never changing and the possible ministration would yes you. And then do nothing or they would even answer you. About six months before the strike the nurses sent a petition to the hospital administration describing the seriousness of the situation and asking for changes. But the hospital took no action. If our group of women. I'm not feeling that good professional medical care is being done in the emergency room and this is a separate corp of doctors but they appeal to the administration of the hospital to rectify this and they are discounted so persistently consistently. Then it

tells me that the hospital administration are not too invested in making changes that they are not that invested in the quality of the care. I don't think the ministration did their job. I don't think I'll whip the top. Do they really care what was going on what they were looking at where their credits. And I want to know how much was coming in how much was going out if they are staying alive or making money. Fine everything must be OK down there. I don't know they're making big profits you know I thought maybe the doctors corporation was doing all right. You know I don't know the financial side of the aisle how much money they were making or how much they were losing in. But that sort of is to the other side of it. That's not the part that nurses were worried about. You know that first of all I wasn't their priority and that wasn't their concern and it wasn't their sort of none of their business in a sense to their concern the major role the nurses the

patient and so were the patients advocate as a nurse doesn't help the patient nobody will. There has to be somebody who sort of watches. The situation intensified somewhat at the time of the strike. I don't think there is any particular thing that sparked them off for that timing. It was a story of. We've had enough. And I we've tried to do has done nothing. And the hospital didn't seem to even. Try to solve any problems and any problem they would solve would be very small problems not the make the big problems. And they just decided they've had enough. Some of the things that were involved in their walkout that maybe pushed them on was the fact that at the time there was a Dr. Chris corporation. But the emergency room was under executive control separated from sort apart from nursing service. And they had been under that

for I guess a year maybe a year and a half. And then the decision was to go back to nursing service. Well when they were under nursing service. Nursing Service doesn't quite understand the problem at emergency room you might have three nurses or four nurses or five nurses and two three doctors standing around for 20 minutes doing nothing because there's nobody. And. They look like they're doing nothing. And maybe they are doing nothing but maybe wrapping some bandages or checking things or whatever or they might just be standing around smoking a cigarette or drinking a cup of coffee waiting for an emergency is not something you can calculate and expect. When it's going to come in and when it's not going to come. So they would tend to poll nurses out of the emergency room to support the floors. But on the other hand if somebody has I'll be lax and it was two or three people

seriously hurt one person who's seriously hurt can consume two maybe three nurses maybe one or two doctors and that right there can wipe out all the personnel emergency room rapidly. And you have people walking in who have minor major problems and you have animal just coming in. And it's something you can't tell exactly when it's going to happen. So the administration decided to put the emergency room back under. The nursing ministration. And the other scuttlebutt was the fact that the man who was president of the corporate doctors corporation was going to be put in charge of the emergency room running the whole she bang. Not just the doctor's part. And he had done such a wonderful job running a doctors that they just couldn't wait from the run the whole thing. And so that that was another part that sort of got them going and they had felt that they had an excellent director who was not a doctor but an administrator who had a lot of empathy for people and their situation and was able to

endear his employees to him to stick up for him. And because he would stick up for them and he would have the guts to tell him when they're wrong and he gets a time when they're right. And so that and then the previous situations of six months before that writing a petition signing it and telling them that they had to do something about it and giving situations. And they had asked for a meeting which the director would not do. He was of the old school were there you do as I say when I say him if you don't like it you weave it. But you don't complain about it and you don't try to change it. So that was sent six months before and they had told him at that time they had to do something about it that it couldn't go on and that if it did go on and there was no evidence of that ministration trying to really resolve some of the problems. But they would make it public. And.

They did. And they got fired. The strike by 26 of Miami Valley's emergency room nurses took place at about 1:00 o'clock Friday afternoon October 5th 973. But before they walked out the nurses tried one final time to appeal to the hospital administration. In Mass the nurses went up for a good number of the nurses. Maybe five six seven nurses went up and presented a letter to the administration. That time the director was not there. I believe may have been vacation or whatever but they presented to his immediate. Assistant Directors studying that there they had these problems and they had to do something about it. That they had that time the nurses had contacted the labor arbitrator to be the media and that they wanted something done they wanted done then not five minutes later an hour later but then and either then or else they end and a total of 26 nurses would be leaving emergency room. In an hour.

And a hospital ministration refused to. Talk give way anything and the nurses went back down and went through the process of getting their critical patients out of the emergency room two floors where they were to go. Notifying. Proper people and 26 nurses. I think maybe. Five six seven that shift. Rocked out and the rest called up saying that they weren't going to come in. A lot of experience walked out the door in the hospital. Watch them go. I don't know for sure what the immediate reaction I get. I would imagine there was a lot of stunned people that there were enough women like that had enough guts to do something like that and how terrible it may have been you know all these ramblings of different sources I mentioned that the. Nursing

office had a lot of trauma at the time trying to figure out how to get shots for the first time in so many years and were things were what mechanics were in and maybe had a little little taste of what the doctors were like eventually and to see what the nurses were talking about. Within a few days of the strike the administration of Miami Valley Hospital asked twenty six nurses to return to work but the women refused to go back to essentially the same medical situation they had walked out on in protest. Instead the nurses asked the hospital to agree in writing to a number of changes in emergency room patient care. The hospital agreed to make the changes but refused to put it in writing. On October 17th the hospital notified the striking nurses telling them to come back to work or be fired. At this point have the nurses returned but the other 13 refused. Within a few days their jobs were terminated. The nurses strike however did have some immediate affects on Miami Valley. A November 1st the hospital

administration terminated its contract with the doctors corporation Valley emergency physicians and three doctors from the emergency room were fired. Also bottles of propane gas for a long time kept dangerously close to the smoking areas of the emergency room were removed to a safer location. And soon after the chief administrator of Miami Valley Frank Sutton resigned. So the strike did have some visible effects but only at the expense of 13 nurses jobs. Then on December 18th 10 of the 13 fired nurses filed suit a month Emery County Common Pleas Court. Originally when they filed suit it was against the corporation of doctors running the emergency room which was a separate corporation from the hospital and they also included in their suit against the hospital administration. What they wanted to do was to reveal to everybody in Dayton what what had been going on what was calling up asking for.

What they had been asking for their jobs and some. Very small. Amount of money more. Just to be able to get a court morning also they haven't asked for a large sum of money. I believe in something like a thousand dollars an hour because they more or less had to. And then they have their records straightened out and wiped clean or whatever. And. The. As I understand the rebuttal of the hospital visit the nurses can't sue on behavior. Have a patient. And we sure the way they sort of presented to the judge that the nurses are suing the hospital because of what they did to the patients and. Which is. You know. Their side of getting it thrown out of kid court. Actually it's the nurses are suing on their own behalf because they had to go through the torment they went through and they were using the patients as examples. That they should shouldn't be and I had to go through a lot of trauma. Because of this and I venture backed out because I've been telling you and

telling you you've done nothing. My understanding is as far as speculating. About the future this suit is that presently. It is being determined whether by the judge or not I'm not sure. But somebody is attempting to determine whether or not the nurses have a right to sue and I don't know if that's a right to sue on behalf of their patients or right to sue in general or specifically or what that means but that's that's where it's at now. I'm optimistic that a rogue person Mr.. I know how the system works. Justice is for those who can afford it. Especially civil courts. The more money you have the more power you have the more. Financial power you personally possess the money you take you know you're the more influential people you hang out with the more people you know. The more that's on your side. And and I know it's making your eight nine thousand

a year is no waste compared to a doctor who makes. Say 8000 at the minimum to 2 but 50 60 80 90 100 thousand a year. Nurses who make that a thousand a year don't hang around with lawyers and judges but doctors who do play golf with them. And they go to parties with them and eat you go to dinner with them and they have more of the house. And just when that point of view of the establishment elite versus the serf I don't think justice really will be done. I sort of think that the judges are in a heck of a bind and he knows that if he makes a decision. For the hospital throwing out of court. That. He's not really doing the say the justice of the thing. And of course I'm a real lawyer telling me that justice and law are two different things and they'll never meet. Which probably is

true but I'd like to see a change but I think they have a heck of a case. And. I think the hospital scared to death that ever got to court because once it gets to court it's open to the general public the news media and whatever and. From evidence I know about. And some of us not being what the hospital knows about. This thing so far wide open. That'll be now and become an area thing but will become a coast to coast and possibly larger and it will make a lot of people happy. Don't make a lot of state people happy you weren't doing your jobs in the health side of things in the capital. It'll make doctors very unhappy. It'll make administrators very unhappy. It'll make nurses very powerful and patients much more protective. For the last few months the nurses have been unable to speak publicly in support of their case because a gag rule has been imposed upon them by the court. Their difficulties however have not

been limited to the courts. I think the nurses were amazing what. They had gotten themselves into. And maybe possibly they had to do in Oregon they may not because of the flack that they have gotten from people in the community or nonsupport community or the trauma they've gone through trying to get a job in the hospital I'm being blackball. They went to different hospitals in the area and they were flatly turned down and told they would hire them. But they were sort of considered you know when asked will say we have no problems we want no problems of course and I just found out later that there is an emergency room we're talking about striking or wanting to see what happened about this other hospital. And I think that you know there was hands off. You know he. You know. Don't touch him there. There are problems here. There are rebels or whatever. And I think things are starting to change I think Harper is starting to see what was going on and I think it's starting to come to light. For now the nurses are in desperate need of contributions to help pay their legal fees.

Help. Money please you know something for just. A slap on the back saying Hey that's great and when you're doing it you know even doctors have done that. But they do it in closed rooms where nobody else can see them. Because they're afraid that maybe they won't get referrals. But it would be great if a bunch of doctors said hey the they did the right thing. It's about time somebody said something about it and let's straighten this damn thing up. Now be nice if organizations would say the same thing. And that would be nice if people would. Write a check. Because someday maybe maybe in emergency room letters and contributions may be sent to post office box 2 9 4 Dayton Ohio 4 5 4 a one for a small donation to nurses will send you a bumper sticker saying. Been to an emergency room lately. Support the ten fired nurses many times I've wanted to be a little mouse in a corner and many boardrooms and and wonder what's going on.

Yeah those. Few days before Christmas when they go through with a lawsuit in the paper by registered mail or whatever. Oh sure it's sort of that or whatever. Now those were directors of my ospital who know about this and didn't want to talk about it and didn't want to do anything how they felt that way. And. You know. Do they still care or are they going to do the same thing again when the next situation arises. Are they going to be more responsible. And these are people who are leaders in our community. Presidents of corporations vice presidents corporations. They're the established elite. Who are keeping the servers you know in their proper place. In the service. Turn around and kick them in the shins. And I hope you've been listening to the views of Bill Doyle and Roberta Fischer. This program was produced by Amy sands and Joanne Wallace. If you. Want. The doorway. You need.

To blow me. Away. You. And I. Always. Say to you I. Mean Hollis was. Told it. Was. Sunny and. Dry.