There were about 200 or so nurses and supporters lining Somerset Street in New Brunswick on Monday when I pulled up at the Magyar Reformed Church, which is serving as the headquarters for striking nurses. The church is located across the street from the entrance to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, part of the RWJ Barnabas health system that is the largest in the state. RWJ-New Brunswick is a major regional trauma center and the largest teaching hospital in New Jersey.
RWJ functions like a corporation. Care is important, but is part of a larger set of priorities that include generating profit — just like any business.
The difference is this: Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital — and healthcare in general — should not be seen purely as a business. It provides necessary services that cannot easily be quantified and assigned a real dollar cost, at least not one that is fair to the patients or the providers. American medicine, overall, is caught in this capitalist vortex, with medicine goals of improving patient lives being sacrificed to insure the profitability of the health insurance firms that fund the system and the drug and device makers who charge exorbitant prices to patients and facilities.
The nurses strike at RWJ is not the first at the hospital, nor is it the only walkout we’ve seen by nurses around the country. There have been strikes and organizing drives in New York City, Massachusetts, and elsewhere over the last year or two. They are asking for better working conditions, particularly better and safer staffing ratios that will allow them and their hospitals to better serve their patients.
They are the front line in the battle with corporate healthcare and deserve our support.
Here is a piece I wrote in 2006, during the last strike at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. It appeared in the short-lived City Belt in October 2006. As I said on Sunday, my nephew was born during the strike.