GUEST EDITORIAL: How to fix the emergency at Sandoval Regional Medical Center

When you rush to a hospital’s emergency department, you’re sick or injured and need care as quickly as possible. If it’s a possible heart attack or stroke, time is of the essence. If it’s a broken femur, you’re in excruciating pain and need to be seen right away. If you slashed your finger while slicing tomatoes, you don’t want a dangerous infection to set in because of a long wait before it’s seen and sutured.

At the University of New Mexico Sandoval Regional Medical Center, your chances of facing a long wait in the ED are pretty good, reducing the likelihood of getting timely, quality patient care. This is a terrible and dangerous situation brought on by unaddressed staffing shortages. UNM Sandoval (administration) has shown no interest in admitting or correcting the reasons for the staff exodus. That’s an incredible statement, but true.

Overwhelming patient loads at UNM Sandoval cause long waits and limited time to spend with patients. About 25% of health care staff quit in 2023 alone. The medical center functions at 130% capacity every day. As a result, patients are not getting the quality of care that they deserve or that the health care professionals want to provide.

At UNM Sandoval, patients spend an average 320 minutes in the emergency department before leaving, or an unbelievable five and a half hours. The state average is 194 minutes, or three hours and 20 minutes, and the national average is 171 minutes, or just under three hours. Some 6% of UNM Sandoval ED patients just give up and leave before being seen. The national average is 3%.

Other problems causing worker angst and staff turnover include workplace violence and subpar pay.

The situation hasn’t gone unnoticed by federal and national hospital safety ratings organizations and by the nurses and other health professionals who care for Sandoval patients every day.

In 2022, 2023 and 2024, Leapfrog, a national organization that rates the quality of hospital patient care, gave Sandoval its lowest rating of a D, down from a C in 2021. Only one other hospital in New Mexico earned a lower rating — University of New Mexico Hospital received an F. Apparently, getting a D hasn’t sparked internal concerns to jumpstart improvements.

The national Centers for Medicare and Medicaid gave Sandoval just one star out of five for an overall rating “based on how well a hospital performs across different areas of quality, such as treating heart attacks and pneumonia, readmission rates and safety of care.”

United Health Professionals of New Mexico members, which include nurses, radiologists, physical therapists, lab techs and other health care professionals, see the problems every day and are gravely concerned. Since we organized as a union two years ago, we have urged hospital management to meet us at the bargaining table to discuss real solutions to real problems, but they have refused. (Administration) and the university’s board of regents have been unwilling to fix the problems. We have ideas but can’t do it alone and need management as a partner.

If the health care workers had a partner in Sandoval management, we could discuss solutions to the poor conditions that the hospital is ignoring. Instead, while failing to address the patient care crisis, it is spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a law firm, which fronts expenses to cover traveling nurses to fill the void of nurses who have left. Traveling nurses fly in, aren’t part of the community and aren’t familiar with the hospital. Wouldn’t it make more sense — and a better use of taxpayer dollars — to pay a living wage to the nurses who call the Rio Rancho area home?

We need Sandoval Regional Medical Center to show respect to its patients and to its health professionals who come to work every day ready to do what they’re trained to do to take care of patients. Meet UHPNM at the bargaining table and partner with us to improve patient care. It’s what hospitals should be in business of doing.

Adrienne Enghouse is an RN and chief organizer of UHPNM.