Nearly 60 workers at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital were laid off Monday as Dignity Health made cuts it described as being driven by \u201cfinancial challenges,\u201d raising concerns about how the staffing reductions could affect patient care.<\/p>\n
Earlier this summer, notices went out to dozens of employees, including registered nurses. The layoffs prompted pushback from the California Nurses Association, which held a picket in Bakersfield.<\/p>\n
Katarina, Kye and Laura Topete, nurses who work for CommonSpirit Health hospitals, said the impact of layoffs extends beyond employees.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to have a ripple effect on everyone,\u201d Kye said. \u201cHealthcare is something that everyone could need at any point in their lives. When you think about yourself or when you think about your family members or your kids, you know this will impact everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Kye and Topete, CommonSpirit Health is mostly laying off front-line workers who provide key support to doctors and nurses, including answering call lights. They said that could mean longer wait times in the emergency room, delayed care and potential medical mistakes as nurses become overworked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don’t have the resources you need your parent to make mistakes. I mean, that’s just that’s human nature, right?\u201d Topete said. \u201cWhen you’re not able to like take the call with a critical lab value and somebody needs like immediate attention you’re not able to respond. Yes. I think that mistakes could happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Topete said she worries the staffing cuts will make it harder for nurses to provide the level of care patients need.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just want to take care of my patients like I really I came into this profession in this field because I like caring for patients I want to make things better,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it’s really demoralizing to not be able to because you don’t have what you need to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 60 workers at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital were laid off Monday as Dignity Health made cuts it described…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[151,153,152],"class_list":["post-424092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield-headlines","tag-bakersfield-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}