Nurses from Aspirus Keweenaw delivered a dose of medicine to the health provider during a rally at the Portage Lake Lift Bridge. The hospital plans to expand its Laurium location with a 36 million dollar project to modernize the facility.
Staff feel management has not taken nursing issues and working conditions seriously. Placing more staff on-call, and increasing the number of patients a nurse care for. Nurses at Aspirus Keweenaw say the problem does lie with a lack of employees. But rather scheduling fewer nurses during shifts.
We’re looking at atypical ways of looking at short staffing. So a lot of people think places are short staff because they don’t have staff. We’re looking at it from the opposite end, where we have staff. We have staff that want to work, but the management isn’t staffing those numbers in the facility. So, we have people at home, on call, that aren’t able to come in and care for their patients during their scheduled shift. So we’re not necessarily, understaffed. We could use more on our list, definitely, but the ones that we have aren’t really being utilized properly. – Mellisa Helppi, MSN-RN, Aspirus Keweenaw Hospital MNA President
Rural health providers face several challenges in the settings they exist. In 2024 Aspirus Health closed its Ontonagon hospital citing declining patient numbers in the facility and emergency room. The provider does continue to operate a clinic the region, providing out-patient services.
Workers placed on call often report heightened feelings of stress and anxiety and can feel frustrated by the desire to work while placed on an on-call schedule.
A lack of staff on medical floors can also impact patient health. Sometimes causing delays in medical treatment or a reduction in quality-of-life standards while in a provider’s care.
More patient load on less nurses decreases the quality and timeliness of patient care. So medications may be running late, patients may feel poorly attended to, maybe hygiene care are not being done as timely as they would like, patients may be waiting to go to the bathroom. There’s higher risks for things like falls when you have less staff attending to more numbers of patients. We also will see where code team numbers can be decreased. We’ve seen some combined roles on code teams, which is atypical. We want to have those good numbers on the code team, lots of experienced staff to help during those high stakes situations. – Mellisa Helppi, MSN-RN, Aspirus Keweenaw Hospital MNA President
In a release from the health provider announce work will start on the expansion Aspirus noted the initiative will improve patient experience, access to health care, and increase efficiency. The project expects to add an additional 28,000 square feet to the hospital, redesign in-patient rooms, and upgrade lab and pharmacy services in the location.
