Hospital Staffing Shortages Cause Harm to Patients

These things don’t scream from the medical chart: “We’re having a staffing problem!” Nurses and doctors don’t write things like that in patient charts. Good trial lawyers know how to identify when staffing may be an issue. For instance, when emergency room nurses stop taking a patient’s vital signs for hours – that is a telltale sign that I have seen. In that case, the unobserved patient (left unattended) suffered catastrophic injuries.

From today’s New York Times report on the large hospital system Ascension,

Both (Chicago) hospitals are owned by one of the country’s largest health systems, Ascension. It spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.

Since the start of the pandemic, nurses have been leaving hospitals in droves. The exodus stems from many factors, with the hospital industry blaming Covidstaff burnout and tight labor markets for acute shortages of staff.

Hospital staffing shortages create gaps and drops in healthcare delivery that I discuss on this blog pretty regularly. As an example, here is a post from September of this year.

Don’t Get Sick