Alfredo Sanchez learned plenty in nursing school, but nothing prepared him for his first job in the trauma intensive care unit at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
The EKG machine, for instance, was fickle; it had a frayed cord that had to be held just so. Then the machine finally died, and Sanchez had to get other over-stretched nurses to cover his critically ill patients while he raced around the hospital, looking for an EKG that worked. When he ran out of canisters for bodily fluids, he had to scavenge for them elsewhere in the hospital. At one point, his unit ran out of the suction tubes used to keep intubated patients’ airways clear. The water machine was laden with bacteria, and all the nurses knew not to use it. The staff continually raised these problems to management, to no avail.
Sanchez, 42, who worked at Crozer-Chester in 2024 after serving in the Army for 20 years, was a paramedic before he became a nurse. In the ICU he took care of people with gunshot wounds, people who had been in life-threatening car accidents, people who had just had major surgery. But as staffing and supply budgets were cut to the bone, he feared for his patients’ survival…