A health care worker in New Jersey created a digital venue for people in the field to chronicle poor working conditions that may put patients at risk. “It is disgusting,” one nurse wrote.
In their accounts, they say the outbreak has turned American hospitals into “war zones.” They talk about being scared to go to work and anxious that they will become infected. They describe managers who seem to not care about their plight.
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“But we show up and have to keep showing up,” one nurse wrote, “and we have to test ourselves.”
The document was created on March 19 by Sonja Schwartzbach, a nurse in New Jersey who is studying as a doctoral student. She said she had started compiling the accounts after she determined that hospital conditions were “far worse” than most people realized and that her fellow health care workers needed a place to share what they were seeing.
“There was such desperation,” she said in an interview. “And it wasn’t being adequately addressed in the news media.”
Ms. Schwartzbach, 34, asked contributors to provide their accounts anonymously, so that they could be candid without fear of losing their jobs. “There’s also a history within nursing of retaliation,” she said.
At the top of the document, Ms. Schwartzbach made an appeal to anyone in the field who had something to contribute: “This isn’t a polite request: This is an urgent demand. Tell me your story. Share your situations. I understand that it can feel challenging to be candid as a health care provider, but this is the difference between life and death.”
Source: Nurses Share Coronavirus Stories Anonymously in an Online Document
