Union members at HealthAlliance Hospital of the Hudson Valley’s Broadway Campus are sounding the alarm over a staffing shortage at the former Kingston Hospital that they say is impacting all facets of the facility’s operations and making it nearly impossible to provide safe, quality care to patients.

The outcry from members of the New York State Nurses Association comes after a round of layoffs in June saw the dismissal of dozens of nurses and hospital support staff. On Monday, about two dozen NYSNA members stood on Broadway in front of the hospital waving signs and chanting slogans demanding more be done to address the staffing crunch there.

RN Erik Grazier, who heads NYSNA’s Broadway Campus bargaining unit, said the impetus for the picket came from hospital staff, not union leaders.

“We just felt like we needed to do something,” said Grazier. “I don’t even know what the ask is, but we need to alert the community that there’s a crisis happening at their local hospital.”

That crisis, union members said, began in April 2020 when HealthAlliance parent company WMCHealth moved inpatient psychiatric and substance abuse services from the Mary’s Avenue Campus (the former Benedictine Hospital) to another subsidiary, Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital in Poughkeepsie. WMCHealth officials said the move would have minimal impact since most of patients coming to the Broadway campus with psychiatric issues could be stabilized at the facility’s five-bed psych emergency room and then released. Those requiring more extensive care could get it a short ambulance ride away in Poughkeepsie.

But nurses on the NYSNA picket line described a different reality. A lack of available beds in Poughkeepsie, they said often left people in acute psychiatric crisis confined to the Broadway campus emergency room for up to a week at a time. At times, the unit is so full, patients are placed on a gurney in a hallway. Detox patients who once had a dedicated unit on Mary’s Avenue are now treated in regular medical-surgical wards where the intensive round-the-clock monitoring they require takes away from more routine patient care.

According to RN Diane Fitzgerald, the situation grew far worse in June when the hospital laid off 41 staff members. Among the job cuts, were 11 of 16 “clinical leads” — registered nurses, typically with decades of experience, who perform administrative duties as well as assist bedside nursing staff with routine patient care. Other cuts included wound care specialists (replaced with contract workers and support staff) who Fitzgerald said played important roles in keeping the hospital running smoothly. Nurse-to-patient ratios, which were previously about four to one, now sometimes go as high as nine to one making it nearly impossible to keep up with important work, like regularly repositioning patients to prevent bedsores.

“From the day after they did those severe firings this place just spiraled into chaos,” said Fitzgerald, whose duties as a floating RN take her to all of the hospital’s wards. “We have been completely understaffed, scary understaffed and not able to provide the care we want to our patients.”

Mass exodus

In the 10 weeks since the layoffs, Fitzgerald estimated that another 100 hospital staffers have resigned out of concern for patient safety, anger over working conditions and frustration with management’s lack of response to the issue. NYSNA members said the staffing shortage has impacted areas of the hospital’s operations beyond direct patient care. With food service shorthanded, patients often wait hours for meals. One day last week, Grazier said the kitchen had been unable to produce a hot breakfast, leaving patients subsisting on dry cereal and milk.

The problems, said Grazier, extend to maintenance and housekeeping — elevators out of service, computer systems down for hours at a time and broken plumbing going unrepaired. When a family member was admitted to the hospital recently, Grazier said he was appalled by the condition of their room.

“I was honestly embarrassed and ashamed,” said Grazier. “The room was filthy, there was dried blood on the floor and it was because we have no housekeeping.”

In a statement released Tuesday, WMCHealth officials said the June layoffs were necessary for the “responsible fiscal management” of the organization and an anticipated piece of a plan to consolidate all hospital services at an upgraded and expanded Mary’s Avenue Campus. But the statement went on to say that staffing at the Broadway hospital had been further impacted by an unanticipated wave of resignations over the summer. To remedy the situation, hospital officials said that they were actively recruiting new staff, including offering positions to some employees who had previously been laid off.

“We are aggressively recruiting additional employees to fill these newly vacant positions,” the statement reads.