Re: “One Day in the Parallel Universe of a London I.C.U.” NY Times Feb 2nd, 2022
Nurses in the U.S. and the U.K. are experiencing a “parallel universe” both inside overcrowded and understaffed hospital wards as well as underfunded and embattled public health systems. Both the American Hospital Association and the U.K. government have promulgated the fiction that regulated safe staffing levels are unnecessary and deny “flexibility” to nurses. At least in the U.K. there is the universal healthcare of the National Health Service that has saved proportionately more lives from the COVID 19 pandemic than the U.S. In my work as an advice nurse during the pandemic, I regularly hear desperately ill COVID 19 patients express reluctance to call 911 for fear of the ensuing bill. Nurses such as myself on both sides of the Atlantic are indeed becoming burned out, not by running out of compassion, but literally sick and tired of being sick and tired while their colleagues, families and patients continue to sicken and die.
Sasha Cuttler RN PhD
RN Chair of Service Employees International Union Local 1021
215 29th Street, San Francisco, CA 94131
mobile phone 1-415-307-3035
This is a 2 hour course that will provide 2 CEUs
The course is designed so that it can be viewed all at once or broken up into segments or what we call chapters. The On-demand Education Library website features an abundance of resource material available in printable format.
Nurses will learn and understand the patient handling injury statistics, history of Safe Patient Handling (SPH) and the requirements of Cal/OSHA’s “Health Care Worker Back and Musculoskeletal Injury Prevention,” which became effective in 2014, and implemented as law passed in 2011. Nurses will learn about studies that have assessed the effect of the law and regulation, early successes and challenges and new challenges posed by the COVID-19 surge in health care.
This free 2 CEU course is presented by the Nurse Alliance of SEIU California and open to all SEIU licensed nurse members. Provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing – CA Provider Number 3413.
For questions email: hughesk@seiunaca.org
To register: tinyurl.com/SEIUNACAregister
This is a three minute piece that was produced about a week ago for December 1st World AIDS Day. Mary Magee, SEIU 1021 retiree sent the journalist to me.
By very sad coincidence, on World AIDS Day, the first known case of the Omicron variant of COVID 19 in the U.S. was discovered in San Francisco. This variant appears to be even more contagious than the Delta variant and was bravely announced by scientists in South Africa. South Africa has suffered preventable deaths from HIV/AIDS because U.S. drug companies refused to allow South Africa to produce generics. Some scientists think that the mutation of COVID 19 may have occurred among people infected with HIV whose immune systems could not eliminate the virus from their system. At the same time, Moderna tested their COVID 19 vaccine in South Africa but then failed to supply the country with it.
Please join me in demanding that South Africans (and ALL people) have access to COVID 19 vaccines and HIV/AIDS treatment. As the old slogan goes: Silence=Death.
Sasha Cuttler RN PhD
RN Chair
SEIU Local 1021
P.S. Get your COVID 19 vaccine booster and flu shot: It’s NOT too late.
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