Standing with Nurses Fighting for Safe Staffing

Right now, 10,000 nurses at Corewell Health East are fighting for their first fair contract.

As a nurse who has worked at the bedside, I was proud to stand with them—not just as a candidate for state representative, but as someone who understands exactly what they are talking about.

The concerns Corewell nurses are raising are the same issues healthcare workers across Michigan have been talking about for years: staffing shortages, burnout, and systems that increasingly push nurses to care for more patients than is safe. Over the past several months I have had the opportunity to stand with nurses and healthcare workers in different communities, and the message has been remarkably consistent. Nurses want to provide safe, high-quality care, and they need the staffing and support to do it.

Corewell nurses are trying to win those protections at the bargaining table. They have been negotiating their first Teamsters contract since June 2025, pushing for safe staffing, fair wages, and basic workplace protections such as just-cause and a real grievance process. Nurses say the hospital system has refused to include safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in the contract and has eliminated benefits like “pull pay” and a student loan repayment program that many nurses relied on. These kinds of decisions send the wrong message to the people who keep our hospitals running, but we

Nursing has always been demanding work. But in recent years the pressures on healthcare workers have increased dramatically. Many hospitals are struggling with chronic staffing shortages and systems that ask nurses to do more with less. When heavy workloads combine with constant moral distress, it becomes harder and harder for nurses to stay in the profession they love.

When nurses speak up about these issues, it is rarely about themselves. It is about the patients who are waiting too long for care, the families who need answers, and the experienced nurses who are leaving the profession because the workload has become unsustainable. When a nurse says, “This is unsafe,” what they are really saying is that their patients are at risk and they are being placed in an impossible position.

Safe staffing is not just a workplace issue. It is a patient safety issue.

When a nurse is responsible for too many patients at once, it becomes harder to catch subtle changes in a patient’s condition, provide medication on time, or answer questions from worried families. Nurses are trained to notice small changes—when a patient looks just a little different than they did an hour ago. That kind of careful attention becomes much harder when hospitals operate with chronic understaffing and constant pressure to do more with less.

I’ve seen what this looks like up close. I have worked shifts where nurses went the entire day without a lunch break because there was no one available to cover their patients. I have seen nurses responsible for more patients than any one person could safely manage. I have also seen nurses punched, kicked, spit on, and have bodily fluids thrown at them while simply trying to provide care.

At the same time, I have seen the extraordinary compassion nurses bring to their work every day. I’ve watched nurses braid a patient’s hair so they could feel a little more like themselves. I’ve seen nurses help families make travel arrangements so loved ones could arrive in time to say goodbye. I’ve seen nurses sit with patients in the middle of the night because they were frightened and alone.

These moments rarely make headlines, but they are at the heart of what nursing is.

Caring for patients should not require sacrificing the wellbeing and safety of the caregivers themselves. No nurse should have to choose between taking a lunch break and making sure every patient gets the care they deserve. No nurse should go home wondering if they missed something important because they were responsible for more patients than any one person could safely manage.

If we want strong healthcare systems in Michigan, we need to value and support the people delivering that care. That means listening to nurses, honoring their expertise, and building healthcare systems that treat them as essential partners in patient safety rather than as an expendable cost.

It also means having more healthcare workers, especially nurses, at the decision-making table in Lansing when laws about hospitals, insurance, and public health are written.

Right now there are 110 members of the Michigan House, and only one is a nurse. That means the voices of bedside caregivers and patients are largely missing when critical decisions are made about healthcare funding, staffing, and public health.

I believe it’s time to send another nurse to Lansing—someone who has actually worked short-staffed, who has answered the call light that’s been blinking too long, and who understands what these policies look like in real life, not just on paper.

When nurses have a voice in our state legislature, patients, families, and entire communities have a stronger voice too.

Michigan’s nurses deserve to be heard. And our patients deserve healthcare systems that are safe, sustainable, and focused on quality care.

If you are a nurse or healthcare worker and want to share your experience, I would be honored to hear your story.

— Rhonda