UPMC nurses from UPMC Altoona traveled to UPMC headquarters in Pittsburgh they’re demanding action to fight their staffing shortage. Now these nurses are going to be in front of the US Steel Tower in Pittsburgh until tomorrow.
These nurses will be in front of the building, which is UPMC headquarters, which is the US Steel tower building in Pittsburgh until tomorrow morning at 11:00 a.m.,
making that a 24 hour cycle. And they’ll be rotating back and forth from a hotel.
But those 24 hours there will be a presence out there to make their voices heard. Nurses from UPMC Altoona say they’re taking their fight to the steps of UPMC’s headquarters, where the
big decisions are made to demand that leaders invest in nurses and invest in patients by hiring more health care workers to help them out.
And the nurses say emergency department wait times have skyrocketed at UPMC Altoona, and they say some patients have been waiting up to 56 hours for care.
“I’m just here to keep fighting and, you know, squeaky wheel gets the grease, so I’m just going to keep reminding them that, you know, we might be more rural, but we’re still here and
we’re going to continue to fight. Our patients deserve the best, and so do we as nurses.”
And we reached out to UPMC officials who said that they do have longer emergency room wait times right now, but that they don’t have a record if it lasted for over 24 hours for some of
those patients.
And they also say that they triage patients and might have to use all space that’s available to them in the hospital.
