When the Trump administration fired 2,000 probationary employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs earlier this year, frontline health care workers were spared from the president’s cuts. But Ann Marie Patterson-Powell said she and other VA nurses still felt the effects of the layoffs.
Medical supplies became harder to track down in her oncology unit at the VA hospital in Durham, North Carolina, Patterson-Powell said. So she ended up going floor to floor looking for blood-pressure cuffs, urinals, alcohol swabs and gauze. Nurses also had to help deliver meal trays to patients’ rooms, something normally done by the food service team, she said.
Patterson-Powell was still there doing her job — she was just doing other tasks, too.
“It took time away from our patient care,” said Patterson-Powell, a VA nurse for 16 years who is also a union representative. “The time that I could be passing out meds or doing some type of assessment, or any type of treatment with my patient, I’m having to pass out [food] trays because the person who usually does it is no longer available.”
“When you lay off support staff, our jobs get harder,” she said.
