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Walk the
floor where my daughter Jodie lies in her nursing-home
bed, and you can hear the sounds of machines keeping
people alive.
Many
patients are elderly. Some are children. Some have grown
old on these machines. In each case, somewhere there is
a family member who loves them and prays that one day
they will get up, walk to the door and, because they no
longer need them, will shut off the machines required
for survival.
It’s a
faint dream because the vast majority couldn’t, and for
the elderly at the end of their days, it’s a question of
dying with dignity.
These
are the people who are at the center of the controversy
over nurses from the Philippines who left their jobs
caring for Jodie and the other patients during a labor
dispute with the nursing-home management.
The
coverage has been a steady drumbeat, with almost daily
questions posed in Newsday as to whether influence and
access to elected officials brought indictments against
the nurses who walked away from my daughter and others
on ventilators at the Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation
Center in Smithtown.
The
questions are relentless, pitting the owners of a
nursing home against immigrant nurses who say their work
agreement has been violated.
Depending on who you speak to, these nurses have either
been manipulated by a cynical labor organizer or abused
by indifferent nursing-home owners. In their native
land, the nurses have become a rallying cry for the
collective anger of expatriates who believe they have
been taken for granted while working in America.
The news
from Jodie’s nursing- room floor is that the families
don’t care about any of this. We don’t care about the
management or the labor organizers or the lawyers
representing either side. Abandoning my daughter and
others who are dependent on constant nursing supervision
was a callous destruction of trust between the caregiver
and those who are lying immobile in their beds.
It may
seem a distant issue for many, but at the end of your
life, you may dimly remember this debate as you lie in a
nursing-home bed. It will be as real as the ventilator
in your room.
At some
point, a jury will decide whether it was legal for
nurses to resign en masse after reporting for work, but
if Jodie could speak, she would tell you it was immoral.
Unfortunately, she will not be present in the courtroom.
Some
parents have been told, “No harm done,” and been asked,
“Why prosecute this matter in the courts?” Would it have
required Jodie to die in order to ask this most basic of
questions: “Are nurses legally or ethically bound to
remain at their posts and deal with their labor disputes
through collective bargaining? Or, unlike firefighters,
police officers and EMS staff, can they simply submit
their resignations as a group and depart with no
notice?”
Is this
area so gray, so confusing, that we need yet one more
law on the books to protect the Jodies among us? Are
labor and management at such loggerheads that it is
perfectly fine for a patient to become “collateral
damage” in any contract dispute?
If
that’s the case, what needs to be considered by Albany
lawmakers is a regulation that states clearly,
unequivocally and for all time, “Nurses permitted to
work in any capacity in the state of New York are not
permitted to walk off the job unless they have given
sufficient notice to supervisory staff who can make
alternate arrangements.”
Write
the law in simple black and white, so that legal
sleight-of-hand and nuances of language can’t protect
those who would use nursing-home patients as pawns.
Include in any future labor agreement a copy of the law
that must be signed by all those employed to protect the
health and dignity of people like Jodie, a young woman
of enormous potential whose life is measured by the
sound of ventilators now overseen by nurses who give a
damn. |
