Our nation’s hospitals are in a staffing crisis of their own making. While the pandemic has strained our nation’s healthcare system and brought frontline healthcare workers to the brink, too many of our workplaces were dangerously understaffed well before the current public health emergency. Now, healthcare workers are burned out and exhausted from the trauma of working in perilous conditions, and they leaving patient care jobs in record numbers.

While the American Hospital Association tries to shift the blame to staffing agencies and to dance around the cause of this crisis, there is no denying the hospitals’ own culpability in creating it. The revenue- and profit-driven, often callous, decision-making of our bosses put their economic bottom line ahead of patient care and the safety of their frontline healthcare workers long before the current pandemic.

For too long, hospitals have chosen lean staffing models, then resorting to the use of on-call and travel nurses to achieve minimum staffing. This long-standing negligent indifference to the safety of their workforce has ensured hospitals remain one of most dangerous places to work in America.

Enough is enough. Sign the petition below and show your support for safe staffing levels for healthcare workers!