Chicago, IL, April 19 — Today, several nurses and doctors from the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Stroger Cook County Hospital showed up at a Governing Board meeting to challenge the administration’s plan to cap admissions and have us turn away transfers of premature babies. One highly respected night-shift nurse expressed the group’s outrage at the plan. She told the board that we do excellent work and bring in $10-14 million per year to the public system. “How can you justify restricting admissions?” she asked. Half of the premature babies in the Stroger NICU are born in smaller hospitals and transported in. With rich private hospitals itching to steal our referral hospitals, putting a cap on transfers and admissions could end up closing our doors permanently.
Before the meeting, we linked this latest attack on our unit to the bigger attacks happening today. When we reminded our co-workers that city rulers are doing the same thing to our public schools, many, especially CHALLENGE readers said, “Yeah, it’s the same thing.”
Many workers believe that the real plan is to privatize the public hospital, and they are right. This is the latest in a 10-year long campaign to end the County Health system that serves mostly black and Latino indigent workers. In fact, if you compare the number of beds and services the County provides today as opposed to a decade ago, they are already more closed than open! Given the assault by the Democrats and the cooperation of the union leaders, these attacks have met little resistance that wasn’t communist–led, and that hasn’t been enough to stop them. Despite hundreds of layoffs and the loss of even more beds, many workers are still surprised that the assault continues, or that they would threaten NICU. As we challenge these illusions, we create a small opening for real political struggle. To seriously challenge these illusions, we must bring communist ideas into the middle of the fight over the immediate demands.
Our presence at the board meeting, the review of the Stroger NICU’s good statistics compared to other units around the country, the drafting of a petition, the demand for meetings, all put pressure on the administration. As the cluster of NICU nurses and doctors got up to walk out of the board meeting after their public statement, one of the CEO’s staffers ran after them. “Dr. Raju wants to meet with the NICU staff. Please wait.” We were shocked. Every other time we had publicly protested hospital policies we were ignored, but this time our whole group was ushered into the big boss’s office suite. The head of the health system was defensive, claiming concerns over patient safety caused by short staffing. Eventually the CEO and System nursing chief promised to hire more nurses and raise the temporary census limit from 17 to 25.
Whether they do or not, remains to be seen. The real victory is that there was fight-back and everybody could see the Party’s leadership in making that happen. A bigger victory will be consolidating our political base with more County health care workers participating in May Day and joining PLP. During the meeting with NICU staff, the CEO said, “Whatever we’ve got to do from our side, we’ll do it…My door is always open to you.” We’ll see. We will meet and decide what is needed; adequate staffing, accommodations for parents to stay with their infants, free parking and vouchers for the cafeteria for lactating mothers, translator services and more. But our unit is one small front in a racist war against the whole working class. While we fight for our patient’s young lives, we fight for communist revolution and a society where health care will be free and available to all, based solely on need.
This story will be continued.