Nurses at Dignity Health St. Bernardine Medical Center in San Bernardino, Calif. held an informational picket on Tuesday, Oct. 29 to protest management’s refusal to address chronic understaffing impacting patient safety, announced California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU). The lack of investment in staffing from CommonSpirit Health, the owners and operators of St. Bernardine Medical Center, is leading to high turnover rates in a hospital that already suffered from inadequate staffing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Because of CommonSpirit’s failure to retain hospital staff, nurses have been forced to take on multiple roles beyond our assigned duties – we are acting as technicians, certified nursing assistants, and transportation and security personnel,” said Donielle Kelosky, RN in the intensive care unit. “This is the definition of unsafe working conditions. Not only do these conditions compromise nurses’ physical and mental well-being, they compromise the safety of the patients entrusted to our care.”
According to 2024 rankings, CommonSpirit Health is the country's largest Catholic hospital chain and the second-largest nonprofit hospital chain in the United States, with a net patient revenue of just under $30 billion. Due to its nonprofit status, the hospital system does not pay tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes – resources that should go back into its workforce and the communities where it operates.
“CommonSpirit has the resources to put an end to the staffing crisis, excessive workloads, and heightened levels of stress and moral distress that nurses are facing and that leadership has failed to adequately address,” said Simon Seyoum, RN in the telemetry unit. “We called the picket because we are tired – tired of working without breaks, working extra shifts, and being short on resources – while we see CommonSpirit collect billions in revenue.”
According to a NNU analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Council of the State Boards of Nursing, there is no shortage of nurses, but there is a serious hospital staffing crisis. In California, there are 166,233 RNs with active licenses who are not working at the bedside. For more information on the reasons why, please read here.
California Nurses Association represents nearly 800 RNs at St. Bernardine Medical Center. The nurses at St. Bernardine notified their employer of the informational picket on October 16.