VA hospital nurses hold demonstration demanding more staff

Justin Gray
·2 min read
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Nurses took to the streets at Atlanta’s VA Medical Center to protest staffing shortages they say limit their ability to do their job.

Channel 2′s Consumer Reporter Justin Gray was at the hospital when they marched on the sidewalk outside the hospital Thursday holding signs. Instead of taking a lunch break or going home after a long shift, they stood outside asking for help.

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Their message was simple: Hire more people.

Nurses say that veterans’ care at the hospital is being impacted by a lack of manpower.

“Staffing is not something that a nurse is in control of,” nurse Yvonne Wheeler said. “A nurse is just a worker, and we work with what we have.”

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It’s a message that the VA leadership hears loud and clear. In fact, when U.S. Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs Denis McDonough was in Atlanta last fall, he told Gray that was the number one topic he discussed with management in Atlanta.

“What I heard upstairs was a very concrete, aggressive plan to fill those staffing slots because uniformly, we have a view that the kinds of wait times we are experiencing here are completely unacceptable,” McDonough said.

The VA issued a statement Thursday, saying

“One of the VA’s top priorities is recruiting, hiring, and retaining our great nurses. To do that, the VA has advocated strongly for the PACT Act and RAISE Act, which has given us increased authority to raise pay caps for VA nurses across the country. We have also maximized bonuses and retention incentives.”

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The nurses protesting Thursday said they are the ones on the front lines seeing how the manpower shortfalls directly affect veterans.

“You want to do the best thing for your patient, do no harm, but you are restricted because you don’t have resources,” Dana Horton said. “And we know the VA can do that. There are things they can do.”

The VA had special authority to speed up the hiring process during the pandemic that has since expired. Nurses say the long hiring process means many qualified applicants taken another job while waiting on the VA position to come through.