Nurses, you can make your 100 days of summer count

By LENORE BORIS
The 100 days of summer are usually associated with nice weather, time off from work and relaxation. However, if you are a PEF nurse, summer is probably a stressful time.

It's likely, your summer is characterized by increased mandatory overtime, working short staffed and limited vacation time off.
And, with the growing shortage of nurses, this summer may prove to be one of the most difficult for PEF nurses.

You are struggling to fulfill your obligation to provide safe, competent nursing care and to safeguard clients, but it becomes more difficult in a demanding, chronically short-staffed work setting.
Tired and overworked, frustrated nurses look for solutions, but effective answers are hard to find.

Slower maybe, but better
You do not have to passively accept summer short staffing as a cyclic curse.
Advocate for improved staffing.

Possibly the most important thing you can do is fill out and file with management (keep a copy) a protest-of-assignment form every time you believe staffing on your unit is inadequate.
These forms will help -
- Provide essential data to support and highlight your complaints to the facility administration about inadequate staff, and can educate managers, the media, the public and policy makers. PEF can use it in press releases, at labor-management meetings, lobbying, letters to the editor, rallies or letter-writing campaigns aimed at top management.
- Raise the consciousness of upper-level managers, whose heightened awareness of staffing patterns, scheduling and related problems on specific units and shifts may help expedite a resolution.
- Shift legal liability to the employer and away from you. Adequate staffing is the employer's responsibility. The form puts managers on notice that a serious staffing situation exists and they need to correct the problem.
- Lift you out of that sense of hopeless frustration, channel your energies into a constructive pattern of standing up for yourself and your patients, and give you and your co-workers a new sense of collective power.

If your facility does not have protest-of-assignment forms, members of PEF's Statewide Nurses Committee can help you get them.

Let the evidence mount
One completed form may not make a difference. But many forms completed by you and your co-workers can become a powerful force for change. It may take a little time, but it can work.

As a nurse, you deserve reasonable time off from work to enjoy some of those 100 days of summer. Goodness knows, you've earned it. You and your patients will be better for it.

How not to get time off:
· Engage in actions prohibited by law, such as a strike or a coordinated sick-out;
· Abandon your patients;
· Delegate activities that are the responsibility of a professional nurse to other staff;
· Create a vacation by inappropriately using sick time; or
· Refuse a work assignment. Remember, the maxim "work now, grieve later" applies to nurses too.

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