Sarah Saullo, a travelling nurse who shared her experiences from Cattaraugus County and Chautauqua, is shown here. She advocates for better working conditions and pay for nurses.
Submitted photo
Sarah Saullo has always wanted to become a nurse.
Since she was a baby, she was a nurse for her dolls. She pursued education as soon as she could to fulfill that dream. Taking care of those who are sick and need her help has been her main focus — and it still is.
Nursing turned out to not be the dream she had hoped it would be and is sometimes more like a nightmare.
“I have been a nurse for nearly 15 years,”Jamestown resident: “I look back thinking how naive I was as a new grad thinking I’d be able to save lives and provide excellent care. Little at that time did I know about the nursing outlook, the deplorable conditions and politics behind it.”
Saullo was a recently employed nurse at a local hospital, but she had to move around the region as a traveling nurse to make ends meet. A regular nursing salary was difficult to come by as a single mother of four.
“I was living paycheck to paycheck,”She said. “I made $10 more an hour than someone that’s working at Tim Hortons or Target. Unsafe nurse-to patient ratios prevented me from providing the quality care my patients deserve. I began traveling nursing to make a decent living as a single mother of four. Finally, I was earning the money I deserved. I do have a master’s degree with 15 years of nursing experience.”
Compensation isn’t the only problem nurses are facing, Saullo said. Patients have also been experiencing an increase in load.
“Every day I am working as a nurse, respiratory (therapist), aide, a housekeeper and maintenance as these positions are vacant,”She said. “I am spit on, hit and verbally attacked by patients. I am there to help those who are dying. I make critical assessments that save lives. The traumas I have seen make me anxious. Fair compensation is not too much to ask in order to keep nurses at the bedside to decrease nurse-patient ratios and provide the quality of care that patients deserve.”
Saullo shared her concerns with the public because of recent efforts by health care organizations across the country to limit the number of nurses who can travel.
Saullo stated that many nurses are fleeing hospitals to work for travel nursing agencies, as they cannot receive the same pay rate at hospitals.
“Their staff are leaving to go travel, leaving them vacancies at their organizations,”She said. “However, in reality, they are complaining about the problem that they have created. Overworked nurses are underpaid. If they had paid their nurses appropriately, they wouldn’t leave for better opportunities. Nurses deserve to be heard and have a voice. We need better pay and better nurse-patient ratios.”
“If you treated your nurses how they should be treated, you pay them and you listen to them — if you treat them well, and you listen to the — you’re going to stop having such high turnover and you’re going to have more nurses on the floor providing care,” Saullo said. “Your nurse-to-patient ratios aren’t going to be as high and you’re going to be able to provide better care.”
Saullo stated that nurses are already overworked, and have a too heavy patient load. Saullo stated that she can see anywhere from 10 to 13 patients on any given day.
“Ideally, it would be like five to six patients per telemetry medical-surgical unit, and you’re having 13 patients and you’re not having an aide,”She said. “Aides are in the same boat as us. They make minimum wage and they’re required to do patient care and post-mortem care. Who wants to have that job?”
Saullo works mostly in telemetry and med-surge pediatric care. She is currently a travel nurse on a COVID device.
“(COVID patients) can change in a heartbeat,”She said. “So, when you have 10 COVID patients, your eyes need to be on each patient monitoring them.”
Saullo stated that nurses are using their skills and their education to save lives, which has been even more difficult during the pandemic.
Saullo said when the day ends, and she finds herself at home, that doesn’t mean she left her work at work.
“You don’t just walk into a hospital and walk out and forget about what has happened that day,”She said. “You remember that stuff forever — for your lifetime. I would love to know how many nurses are diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and PTSD.”
These problems aren’t just local problems, Saullo said.
“It’s all across the nation,”She said. “It’s not just in this area, it’s everywhere. It’s a little crazy because if you look at anything, there’s nobody even talking about it. All of a sudden, this popped up, ‘Oh, let’s cap travel nurse pay because they’re making too much.’ Nobody even talks about nurses.”
Saullo stated that she will continue to fight for better working conditions and pay. She has plans to attend United Nurses March, which will be held in Washington D.C., on May 12.
“I was my voice to be heard,”She said.