Former PeaceHealth nurses are accusing the Catholic nonprofit hospital operator of retaliating against its employees who complain about working conditions and patient safety.
Ketchikan’s hospital operator is expected to address a nurse’s complaint at a federal labor board hearing this summer.
Marian Weber is a traveling nurse who, until last August, worked at PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center, which serves southern Southeast Alaska.
Weber says she expressed concerns to her superiors about a critically ill COVID-19 patient not being placed in the ICU. And she says she pushed back when PeaceHealth suggested a nurse sit with a potentially infectious patient as an alternative.
“I voiced safety concerns related to patient and staff safety related to COVID-19 hazard,” Weber said in a phone interview this week.
She says a hospital executive told her, more or less, that if she didn’t like it, she could leave.
“I went through the chain of command, filed incident reports and subsequently was terminated,” she said.
She told her story to KRBD in September. Four days later, the head of the hospital told staff that the administrator who’d threatened Weber’s job had abruptly left.
Since then, Weber says she hasn’t had any trouble finding work elsewhere, picking up nursing contracts in Montana and Vermont.
PeaceHealth sent a written statement denying any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, state and federal labor officials have been looking into Weber’s complaints.
Now, the National Labor Relations Board is asking an administrative law judge to order PeaceHealth to apologize to Weber and reimburse her for travel expenses and other costs incurred after Weber was fired and moved back to the Lower 48. A hearing is set for June 7.
It’s not the first time PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center has been scrutinized by federal labor officials for allegedly retaliating against its workforce. The hospital was…