Detroit Hospital Workers Say Two Patients Died in Hallway Due to Overwhelmed Emergency Rooms
Many of the patients admitted to the ER are presumed to have COVID-19, but their tests results take days to process, the hospital workers said.
Sinai-Grace Hospital did not respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
The emergency rooms have become so overrun at Sinai-Grace that night shift ER nurses staged a sit-in on Sunday night after demanding that hospital administrators bring in more nurses for assistance, a doctor at the hospital told CNN
After four hours, administrators told nurses that they would have to work or would be forced to leave; hospital officials also said they would not be scheduling extra nurses.
After the incident, ER nurse Sal Hadwan streamed live on Facebook sharing with viewers that after so many days of being overworked, Sunday was “a breaking point” for the nurses at his hospital.
“Because we cannot safely take care of your loved ones out here with just six, seven nurses and multiple [ventilators] and multiple people on drips. It’s not right. We had two nurses the other day who had 26 patients with 10 [ventilators],” he said.
Hadwan added that for more than three weeks straight, the Sinai-Grace ER has had more than 110 patients.
Jamie Brown, the president of the Michigan Nurses Association, told CNN, “Until hospitals start taking the concerns of nurses seriously, it’s only a matter of time before more actions like these occur.
As of April 9, Michigan has the third-most amount of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country, behind only New York and New Jersey, with at least 20,220 confirmed cases, while at least 959 people have died.
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