‘It’s Been a Matter of Life and Death.’ Dr. Bonnie Castillo on How Nurses Have Been Left to Fend for Themselves During the Pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched on, the American health care system has trusted the tireless efforts of nurses to esteem the ill, are inclined to the death, and dwell the sickness from seeping outdoors sanatorium doorways. But despite all of these nurses’ dedication, they themselves had been let down—no longer handiest by utter and native governments, nevertheless by the health care system as an entire, says Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and executive director of National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association.

Castillo, who became once recognized for her advocacy work as a member of the 2020 TIME100 listing of primarily the most influential of us on this planet, has been calling consideration to shortages of non-public retaining tools to present protection to health care staff for at the least six months. But as she informed Senior TIME Correspondent Alice Park in a TIME100 Talks dialogue, the U.S. is quiet creating short on important objects adore N95 face masks, leaving nurses unable to present protection to themselves, the general public or their sufferers. To carry out up for these shortfalls, Castillo feels that the U.S. must build the Protection Production Act, which some critics feel the federal authorities has no longer employed aggressively enough to create enough masks for health care staff.

“It’s very frustrating because all of us know what we need,” says Castillo, noting that countries adore South Korea possess successfully produced their non-public non-public retaining tools. “Whereas we are saying the virus is unusual, the science of infectious decide a watch on and protection isn’t, and so all of us know that we may also possess done better, and we want to quiet build better.”

Castillo says that nurses had been left to fend for themselves to acquire by the pandemic. She notes that nurses possess needed to carry their non-public non-public retaining tools to work, and even depend on traffic to borrow N95 asks. In flip, unions possess moreover needed to fight for nurses, to be distinct that that they obtain the non-public retaining tools that they need. Nonetheless, it hasn’t been enough to present protection to some nurses; 11 contributors of National Nurses United by myself possess died.

“For us, it’s been a topic of lifestyles and loss of life,” says Castillo. “If we had no longer been accessible and collectively advocating and combating, tooth and nail, for every single N95 and each single protection, we would possess lost many more.”

In Castillo’s belief, American citizens possess suffered due to a scarcity of management within the fight in opposition to COVID-19. To originate to flip the nation’s trajectory, she says, the US must at closing build a coordinated nationwide response.

Nonetheless, Castillo says, the nation must moreover deal with one among the foundation problems that’s making the COVID-19 pandemic so painful: a health care system that doesn’t build of us before revenue. In her belief, that would be by a “Medicare For All” program.

“Now we possess viewed this approach characteristic below a virulent disease,” Castillo says. “And it has been an insist failure.”

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