Overview  |  Stressed  |  Exhausted  |  Exploited  |  Abandoned

EXHAUSTED: NURSING AT BOSTON MEDICAL

“It starts around four a.m., so you’ve been there a good nine hours and all you think about is your bed. . . . It’s exhausting and it’s worse because you’d go home, you’d sleep, maybe at noon you’d wake up. You’d have a headache because you haven’t had caffeine. So, now you wake up, you have a headache, you’re disoriented, you don’t know what you need to eat.”

Boston City Hospital served the poor and indigent of the city for more than a century and in 1996 merged with the Boston University Hospital to become Boston Medical Center. The nurses are a tough bunch, committed to their work, but the health care system nationwide is in crisis, and Boston Medical is no exception. Their union has negotiated a decent pay package, but most nurses work long, irregular shifts, and the pressure to work overtime, in a system desperately short of nurses, is huge. Janet Killarney has worked as a nurse since 1994.

“They are unwilling to let people balance their schedules, so then this poor person has to stay, and I have to make three phone calls for her.... How effective do you think she is being? She had her eight-year-old son get off the bus and there is no one there to pick him up. What are you doing in all these meetings that you can’t figure this stuff out?”

“So, we’re like the wrong side of the tracks. We take all the indigents and the crazies and gun shot wounds. I don’t think you could find a better group of trauma staff than you can find here... I think there is still some of that genuine caring for people, the poorest of the poor of the city, who still come here.”