Strike limits access to treatments
| • | 800 nurses at Queen's joining picket lines today |
| • | Analysis: Dispute reflects healthcare crisis |
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
Patients in Hawai'i who already face life-threatening illnesses yesterday got something else to worry about as hospitals struck by the Hawaii Nurses Association began cutting back some services.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
"We are like the children in a divorce," dialysis patient Bernie Lono said, her bright red blood coursing into and out of a machine. "The nurses are our mother, the hospital is our father, and we love them both, but we sure want them to get back together again."
Lei Chang, a St. Francis nurse manager, yesterday administered chemotherapy to Aida "Nana" Kumagai, while nurses were on strike.
Lono is one of about 1,000 people with end-stage kidney failure who had their hours of outpatient time on dialysis machines cut back yesterday after nurses went on strike at St. Francis Medical Center on Liliha Street.
Her situation illustrates the strike's effect on areas of specialized healthcare that St. Francis and other hospitals have carved out for themselves in Hawai'i: if they stop operating, there aren't enough other specialized facilities in the state to take up the slack. For example, two-third's of the state's 1,500 dialysis patients receive treatment at St. Francis, said the National Kidney Foundation of Hawai'i.
"And it's not like in Washington, D.C., where the nurse's union is based," Medical Care Association president Richard Meiers said. "Back there, you can just drive into Virginia or Maryland and get your treatment. Here, we've got 2,500 miles of water in every direction."
St. Francis is cutting about 30 minutes from the typical three- to five-hour dialysis sessions patients come in for three times a week.
Hospital spokeswoman Maggie Jarrett said the medical director of the service "said in the short term there should not be any significant effects on the patient outcomes."
Lono sees the situation in plainer terms.
"Someone told all of us a long time ago that if we did not go on the machines we would die," she said.
The other 30 people she started dialysis with 30 years ago have died.
Every hour that she is not on the machine, she said, reduces by some amount the time she will remain alive.
A few of the 320 dialysis patients being served at the Liliha hospital grumbled about losing time on the machines, but the rest accepted the cutbacks as necessary to preserve at least a reduced level of continuous service for all, she said.
Lono, a patient advocate in the Renal Awareness Patient Program at St. Francis, is the lead name in a class action lawsuit filed yesterday asking the Circuit Court to order the union to send some nurses in dialysis, hospice and transplant services back to work because they are essential to keep some patients alive.
"I'm not a strikebreaker," Lono said from her aqua-colored reclining chair in the gleaming new Siemens Center at St. Francis. "But if the court orders it, those nurses can come back and not be strike-breakers, either."
Lono began to twitch a bit, and asked Operations Manager Betty Leo Ringrose to push some Benadryl through the intravenous tube to counter an allergic reaction to the treatment.
Ringrose said she and another supervisor are taking the place of four or five registered nurses normally on duty to assist dialysis technicians tending the patients.
"How is it going?" she replied to a question. "Ask me in a few days."
Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.
