Salt Lake County Jail Hires Nurses to Ease Staffing Shortage
Nurse Erica Clark works Monday at the Salt Lake County Jail Autonomous Health System. The prison is down about a quarter of its healthcare staff. (Lauren Steinbrecher, KSL-TV)
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SALT LAKE CITY — The Salt Lake County Jail is experiencing a shortage that normally affects the health care industry: it can’t hire enough nurses.
It says it has lost around a quarter of its nursing staff and hopes to fill those gaps as soon as possible.
The prison, which can house approximately 2,000 inmates, contains its own self-contained health care system.
Often, this health care is crucial for the people who receive it.
“Usually their stay here is probably their first contact with medical care, so it’s really nice to be able to help them and reach out and get them the care they need,” nurse Erica said. Clark.
She sees all kinds of patients for needs ranging from general care to geriatrics, maternity and obstetrics, mental health and dental care.
While this provides Clark with full experience in the medical world, she knows that the people she serves might not otherwise get these services – like an inmate Clark recently helped diagnose.
Clark explained that the woman didn’t get out of bed or eat, and the woman described how she couldn’t “cross the pond” into her cell, and that there was “a fairy coming out of a portal “to steal his oxygen. heart.
From there, Clark sensed something more was going on and made a further assessment.
His intuition was correct.
“It turned out she had heart disease and she was able to have surgery and fix that,” Clark said. “So that was really great and rewarding.”
But that kind of care becomes more difficult if there aren’t enough nurses like Clark.
Sheriff Rosie Rivera said there are currently 14 nurses short of the usual 57 staff.
That means the nurses who work there now are absorbing the impacts of understaffing.
“They need to do more overtime and we need to make sure those shifts are covered, and that’s what we’re doing,” Rivera said. “But the challenge is, are we exhausting who we have? We don’t want to do that.”
They need to work more overtime and we need to make sure those shifts are covered…but the challenge is do we burn out the ones we have? We don’t want to do that.
–Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera
Rivera described how they’ve increased salaries and added environmental pay, but can’t keep pace with the rising cost of living.
In addition, they compete with hospitals and the private sector for hiring.
She plans to go to Salt Lake County Council for help.
“Now we’re going to start over and make another request, because we have to follow the market,” Rivera said.
She said they were also going to make a huge push on social media and their website as they spread the word and recruit.
He hopes to fill the positions soon so that nurses like Clark get the help they need as they provide critical care to others.
“There’s just a wide range of things. You never get bored, it always changes, and you get a lot of experience,” Clark said, explaining why she loves her job. “And then you can always be there to stand up for people who don’t have a voice and aren’t normally seen or heard.”