Four Years After the Pandemic Hit South Florida, Healthcare Workers Still Feeling Effects

March 2024 marks four years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. Thankfully, we’re long past lockdowns, overrun emergency rooms, and makeshift morgues. But for the millions who lost loved ones — in Florida, about 93,000 people died related to the virus — and many millions more who suffered serious illness and effects, the trauma remains fresh.

Front-line healthcare workers like me, who served at the pandemic’s ground zero in South Florida hospitals and nursing homes, are still feeling the acute effects, as well.

A critical staffing, retention, and care crisis, which was growing for years but made exponentially worse by the pandemic, continues to put caregivers and their patient's communities at risk.

In our community, we’ve had it especially hard. Along with the sizable elderly population, the giant healthcare corporations that own the hospitals and nursing homes are chronically understaffed, underpay, and underprotect their workers.

Short staffing means caregivers have less time with each patient and must scramble from room to room. Patients must wait longer for meals, medications, and other important attention. This might mean an elderly patient isn’t taken to the bathroom in time, or they aren’t turned frequently enough, both of which can lead to serious infections and much worse.

In critical care situations, short staffing easily can lead to disastrous mistakes.

It doesn’t have to be this way, especially when healthcare companies are making billions of dollars in profit each year. Investors and management are richly rewarded through massive stock repurchases and executive compensation in the tens of millions of dollars, while patients and their caregivers suffer. Many direct care personnel, as well as important environmental and dietary staff, are paid less than $15 per hour.

All of this has created a revolving door of stress, turnover, lack of experienced staff, and a dangerous downward spiral of care.

To stem this crisis, facilities must raise staffing to safe levels in all care and service jobs, pay living wages for all workers, and provide safe workplaces.

Caregivers must have the freedom to express safety concerns without employer retaliation or intimidation, and the right to form a union which is essential for workers to have a voice and proper protections in their jobs.

In general, healthcare companies need to create a working environment that attracts qualified candidates and, just as importantly, retains the most trained, talented, and experienced caregivers.

We also need lawmakers to hold these industries accountable. Nationally, the Biden administration has proposed a strong set of staffing requirements for nursing homes and other quality healthcare standards.

In Florida, state legislators recently passed the Live Health Act designed to grow Florida’s healthcare workforce. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely two other excellent proposals — the Florida Healthcare Transparency Bill and the Florida Patient Protection Act — will be approved by the time the Legislature adjourns at the end of the week. But we’re committed to try again in next year’s session.

In the meantime, front-line healthcare workers like me will continue working with lawmakers to find real solutions. We will support those who truly serve Florida’s needs, or elect new ones who will. We will continue calling on our employers to address the critical staffing crisis, and we will continue providing the very best care we can to our patients.

So, in March 2025, on the pandemic’s fifth anniversary, we hope to be further healed, protected, and in a better, forward-looking Florida for all.

Shirley Vyent is a certified nursing assistant in a Miami nursing home and a member-leader of 1199SEIU, the largest union of healthcare workers in the state.

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