Orange County Nurses Strike Claiming Unsafe Conditions Amid COVID

ANAHEIM, CA — Nurses picketed outside emergency rooms of multiple KPC Global hospitals Wednesday, striking against unsafe working conditions amid coronavirus. Nurses walked picket lines outside of South Coast Global Medical Center, West Anaheim Global Medical Center, Anaheim Global Medical Center, and Chapman Global Medical Center.

While Orange County hospitals are reaching record admissions of coronavirus patients, the nurses claim that there is not enough staff for proper patient care.

A press release from the union says that nurses "are getting slaughtered in the ER."

Rasha Tran, a West Anaheim Medical Center nurse, described the conditions that read like wartime. "We literally had to do a blood transfusion in the hallway," she writes. "Ambulances are just leaving their patients in the ER because they are waiting too long for a bed. I don't even know how we can sustain this."

Stories of a scarcity of personal protection equipment say that nurses are put at risk when "they are needed the very most."

According to Executive Director Bonnie Castillo of the California Nurses Association, "nurses have been working under enormous strain, putting their lives and safety in jeopardy, without enough personal protection equipment, and without sufficient hospital engineering controls to reduce the spread of infection that have turned hospitals into Covid-19 hot zones."

Meanwhile, KPC Global issued a statement asking doctors and patients to avoid scheduling elective surgeries during the winter surge.

According to National Nurses United, KPC Global Hospitals nurses say they will never stop fighting, especially given that the pandemic is the absolute worst time to overload nurses with patients whose conditions are even more severe than before the pandemic.

Patch has reached out to KPC Global for a comment and will update this report when one is received.