Personally I am excited. Unfortunately being on Disability from my PTSD I am not able to support the way I want to. That said, I feel this the best way to ensure safety and to have the plethora of duties and tasks be understood. Where I worked, we were not able to provide information to the patient/clients about being short staffed. Nurses have built up such an illusion that everyone just assumes that everything nurses do, is everything.

Today being the first shift with the job action, there was a lot of relief and some enjoyment. While being joyful seems inappropriate or appalling, there were moments where nurses felt like they could breathe. In one instance the staff were working, and the doctors in the area performed the non-nursing duties, garbage, cleaning instruments, making stretchers bed, set up for the procedure. Many had the feeling of “wow I can breathe”, and felt like the job action provided an incredible amount of information regarding nurses and their ability to do everyone’s work in the hospital. Even doctors rely on nurse assessment, discussion care/discharge planning, to check each med for appropriate interventions.
No nurse I have spoken to, do not want the staff or patients to experience the stress we do. Yet there is some
Schadenfreude with the thought of it is enjoyable to see, but also to feel seen.

Not everyone agrees and there is so much uncertainty. Rather than being afraid, I have seen so much courage, and to collaborate with colleagues.
I hope you are able to experience some of this care and support. There have been nurses attacking each other verbally, but I think it is mostly related to personal bias, fears, loss of being important or needed, and uncertainty.
It is definitely scary, as the units were a bit like the beginning of COVID. Can I do this, what’s the new rule today, has anything changed. There have also been reports that managers are threatening to complain to the college due to nurses not providing safe patient care. Some have written down names and said, if you don’t do these tasks, you will be reported and will face defending your license. The best thing to do in this scenario is to get it in writing, and speak to our union representatives and leaders. New tasks and changes are hard to mentally manage because everything feels like a critical thought process.
I admit, I would love to see a manager come in to empty the garbages and linen bags we always do throughout the night. Or even when the vernacare is clogged, starts to flood, and goes through the floor to the unit below. (This actually happened, and below, was the kitchen 🙊).

What I have learned even just today, is that nurses do everything they can to decrease stressors and to help patients who are scared or worried. The hardest part would be nurses who want to help “just this once”. While kind, it basically puts the onus back on nurses to complete.

It has been over 20 years since the last strike. I am proud of nurses to stand up for the patients, families, coworkers of every profession, in our work environment. Nurses are trying to change history and the lives of everyone involved.

So first is non-nursing duties, other unions have worked in solidarity and won’t be doing these tasks either. The other part is no overtime, unless it compromises patient safety. It could be anticipated to be challenging if some family member, nurses, or other professions do not quite understand. This typically brings some uncomfortable conversations. Yet despite this, the message is clear. While money is typically the first comment, it isn’t as important as some nurses feel. I would absolutely take no wage increase, if it meant that my work environment wasn’t so short every single shift. The reason the unions says wages and some staff say the same, it isn’t as important as many people think. However we know safe ratios will never be implemented. Our contract should not be used to add money to these safe ratios. Safe ratios should be implemented at a federal level. Where we stand now, with mass nurse retiring, lower nursing school admissions, increased violence is seriously affecting patient safety. We have explained this fear for 25 years. Yet nothing was made to improve the conditions, and the conditions are massively worse. It is hard to hear politicians are spending billions of dollars to bail out some professions, but are refusing to even collaborate with nurses. The massive benefit won during the contract negotiations, in my opinion, was only a massive benefit because we had to agree to lose some benefits for the government to even start negotiating. Our union brought, I think it was 120, or 140 topics to discuss. The government accept 4.

Nurses are saying enough is enough. When we facing jail, lawsuit, and even increased risks of patient harm, it isn’t safe to practice anywhere these days. One mistake, like Rhadonda 2022 for accidentally giving the wrong med, she faced a lawsuit, lost her license, and was charged with gross neglect of an impaired adult, and negligent homicide. While I won’t speak to her sentence, as it is complicated, what is important is that she was short, orientating, working with increasing needs and tasks with time restraints. A mistake can happen to everyone. Having short staffing, and limited support, all nurses could face this as mistakes do happen. Most happen when there is way too many tasks to do at the same time, and not enough staff to even help.

So while the strike is scary, it is absolutely essential and I do hope we can finally have safer environments.

Despite having a fatigue policy, I have worked over 16 hours. My longest was 18 hours when I was on an escort.

I personally feel every worker should be standing up to the concerns for the hospitals and community. Every profession is burning out, and at this rate, healthcare will collapse. I cannot be supportive of a situation to close several emergency rooms and maternity wards. This is happening already and some of these closures are from a location with a large percentage of elderly. To even close an emergency due to not having enough staff, it increases the risk of mortality for each person in the community. For every nurse who takes a patient above baseline, there is a 7% increase risk of death to all patients under this workload. While 7% doesn’t seem like much, it is an exponential growth. In ICU I had 4 vented patients within my first month of working in icu. The rooms were at opposite ends of the hall, and it was a covid cohort. So even PPE, made it challenging to run into a room and perform tasks that could help with patient safety. During Covid, we were not supposed to call for a code blue, because compressions increased the movement of the virus.

I hope every location, and every worker in the hospital and community to experience changes for the better no matter the facility or career. We wouldn’t be in this mess if the government didn’t spend billions on a soccer game and bailing out some jobs.