When First Responders Are Women - a podcast by Laura Flanders

It shouldn’t take a strike to keep first responders safe, but that seems to be what’s needed when those first responders are women.

Hunks in hard hats, we make our heroes. Women in scrubs we’re not so sure about.

Kaci Hickox, on her return from Sierra Leone, got quarantined in an outdoor tent at Newark Airport. Nurses at Bellevue where New York’s first Ebola patient got care, report being shunned in hospital elevators whether or not they treated Dr. Spencer. One lost a teaching gig. Another’s child was banned from day care.

New York officials have finally promised to protect health workers from losing pay or promotions if they have to be quarantined. The new protections are modeled on the rights granted military reservists. If it takes a military metaphor, so be it:

If we wouldn’t send a soldier to the front without a weapon, why is it so hard to require that our front line nurses be cared for? The nurses are our front line of defense — whether or not they go to West Africa and there's a reason Liberians are said to call Ebola the “nurse-killer.”

I spent a couple of days with National Nurses United this week, the largest US nurses organization. They’re in contract negotiations with the California hospital chain, Kaiser, at the very same time that they’re fighting for safe effective Ebola standards. And the two fights are coming together - and to a head - this November.

Why is it so hard to ensure protections for health care workers, and ipso facto, their patients? Because nurses - male or female - are low on the job-security totem pole. After Thomas Duncan first showed up with Ebola in Dallas, NNU received calls from nurses scared stiff that the’d be fired for disclosing that, contrary to the official talk of preparedness, Duncan’s nurses had been left to tape their own gowns to their masks leaving their skin exposed while they cared for him.

Brina Aguirre, the Dallas RN who spoke up, should be remembered as the Karen Silkwood of our time, says NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro.

But atomic worker Silkwood ended up suspiciously contaminated and dead. It be nice if our nurses didn’t go the way of Silkwood.

The NNU’s set November 12, for national actions, including a two day strike by 18,000 registered nurses at Kaiser. The latest CDC guidelines are an improvement, they say, but they’re still voluntary and full of loopholes. Without a national health system, our nation’s 5,000 hospitals are free to make 5,000 different decisions and being a for-profit system, dollars and cents have a way of trumping medical sense — nurses see it daily.

Which is why NNU is calling on California, the 8th largest economy in the world, to set a national standard including a legal mandate and full-body hazmat suits — and they’re threatening strike action to get it.

If nurses were cops, we’d be giving them tanks. If they were firefighters, there’d be nothing optional about their fireproof jackets. If they were rushing into burning buildings, instead of laying hands on sick people, we’d guarantee them protective gear? What is we don’t care about, about our nurses?

You can watch my interview with best selling author Walter Mosley on the Laura Flanders Show at GRITtv.org and write to me: Laura@GRITtv.org.

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