HCA

More than 350 nurses from SEIU locals from numerous states recently gathered in Miami for a dynamic professional development conference and a dramatic rally that highlighted the staffing, retention and care crisis in healthcare facilities in Florida and across the country.

Supervisors at HCA Florida Regional Hospital had been failing to properly follow the staffing rotation and rules by regularly sending O.R. nurses home early before their shifts were supposed to end, forcing nurses to use their PTO.

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A total of 52 Florida hospitals had no available intensive care unit beds on Friday – including six facilities in Hillsborough County – as coronavirus cases rise throughout the state.

MIAMI----While its members work on the front lines of the Covid-19 public health emergency, the bargaining committee of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East today has rejected layoffs and pay cuts proposed by HCA hospitals across Florida.

I am an orthopedic surgical nurse at University Hospital and Medical Center in Tamarac, FL, and simply doing my job could be fatal. It’s not just that some healthcare professionals who contract Coronavirus get sicker than other patients. It’s that my diabetes puts me at an especially high risk. And yet, I continue to don my scrubs and stethoscope and report to the hospital. My patients who are recovering from surgeries are particularly vulnerable right now, and I’m not going to let them down.

MIAMI---Nurses with Florida’s largest healthcare union, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, have rejected new COVID-19 protocols from Hospital Corporation of America that weaken protections for caregivers against the highly contagious virus in HCA facilities around the state.

We’re more than a week away from the projected peak of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Tampa Bay and the state, but more than 20,000 Floridians already have tested positive and nearly 500 have died from the highly contagious virus. And healthcare workers, on the critical front lines to defend public health, presently are forced to provide care while facing dangerous shortages of masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment (PPE).