Nurses at Saint Joseph’s and Saint Mary’s hospitals in Tucson are staging a protest outside Saint Joseph’s Medical Hospital, demanding an end to what they call unsafe staffing conditions for workers and patients.
The National Nurses Organizing Committee has been in negotiations with hospital ownership — Carondelet Health Network, a branch of Tenet Healthcare — for months. Nurses say staffing shortages have reached a crisis point.
Jaclyn Steinke, a telemetry nurse at Saint Mary’s, said her department is supposed to maintain a ratio of one nurse for every 4 patients. Staffing shortages have pushed that number to six patients per nurse…