Nurse News: VA ICU Nurse Alex Pretti Fatally Shot by Border Patrol, L&D Nurse Calls Out Unsafe Staffing, ‘Nurses SHIFT Change’ Petition, and 31K Kaiser Nurses Strike in CA & HI

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Welcome to Club Nurse. I'm Colton Lord, your host. By you being here today, it shows me that you are someone who wants to learn, Grow, laugh, connect, and just let your emotions flow. We are here to share real stories and hear real life experiences from real people. You are not alone in this, and Club Nurse is here to show you that. Don't forget to follow the show and share today's episode with someone you love. Now let's dive into today's conversation.

Welcome back to the Club Nurse Podcast. My name is Colton Lord, your host. I thank you so much for being here, for tuning in, uh, where I am bringing you the most up-to-date and breaking news in The world of nursing and healthcare. And we've got a little bit to talk about today. Anybody with a social media account or who watches the news has felt, I think, the weight of what has happened over the last few days, over the last week. I think that the world, the country, and then the healthcare and nursing community especially are feeling extra heavy dealing with, you know, kind of just the emotions and the waves of things that are going on. I know that the world feels like a really wild place and I think that we all feel that weight, but I just, if I can offer any kind of light for anybody out there to see through darkness, if there's any cracks of light, it's that yes, things can be hard and scary, but we need to remember, you know, we're fed very negative things in our daily lives now with social media and just constant consumption that if our worldview is being so narrowed into what we're watching on social media, on the news, we are going to start to believe that we are living in such an evil world. And while there are a lot of evil things happening, a lot of bad things, and while I think that it's very important to stay informed and stay in the know, I just wanna say that that's not representative of our world and humanity at large. We just see the worst of the worst every day in what we're consuming. And if we can just maybe just take a step back from that, maybe consume a little bit less, stay informed, but not obsess over it, put the phone away and just kind of, you know, look out into your surroundings and what's around you. Just maybe that will give you just like a little bit of, Hope, a little bit of light that that's you know there's always been crazy things going on in the world. There's always been big world events and tragedies and and corruption and just really bad things happening. And I think it's just how we deal with that on the insides and how we process that is really huge to our own just mental health. And again, I think it's very important to stay informed, to have an opinion, and to know what's going on in the world. But just just take that little that little nugget that it's not. That does not represent the world at large as to you know what we're seeing every day on the news. So with that, let's talk about what happened with the VA ICU nurse Alex Pretty. Like I said, I am sure most of you have seen the onslaught of social media posts and the videos. And if you are somebody who actually watched the video of Alex Pretty dying, it is really, really, really devastating. It's hard to watch, but it's real. It happened in the streets of Minneapolis. He's a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse, licensed. In Minnesota since 2021, praised by colleagues as outstanding and deeply compassionate towards patients. And I just wanted to make this note here. I even made this in my own social media posts, which you can see at Nurse Colton on Instagram, that yes, he was a nurse, but there was so much more to him. Uh, his, you know, he was a son. He had an ex-wife who spoke kindly of him. He was a very loving dog parent who just recently lost his dog, loves the outdoors. Like, there's so much more about him than being a nurse, but being a nurse is part of who he was. So we want to honor that for sure. Federal agents say that Pretty approached them armed and resisted. Bystander videos and New York Times analysis showed him recording before being wrestled down and shot. So you can watch the video, make that opinion for yourself on what you are seeing, but just know that you are— what you are seeing when you watch the video is true. And yeah, I'll just leave it at that. The ANA condemns the violence, extends condolences, and calls for a full investigation into the death of this nurse amid rising community tensions. Again, yes, it is a Definitely a trigger warning to be watching those videos. Take care of yourself. You don't have to go watch it. You already know kind of what's going on. You're being informed. Prior to his nursing career, Alex Pretty, per his LinkedIn profile, shows that he attended the University of Minnesota Medical School and worked as a junior scientist starting in 2012. Later became a registered nurse licensed in Minnesota, with his license issued in January of 2021 and active through March 2026. According to nurses, he worked in the VA's ICU where he cared for critically ill veterans. So there's a very heartwarming video on social media of Alex Preddy giving a veteran that he had treated in the ICU their final salute. Uh, so it's very obvious that this was a very caring, compassionate, warm human being. His family, you know, in the, in the articles and the news briefings I was reading, his family spoke very highly of him, just saying that he really cared deeply about the moral injustices of the world and the country. And he was out there with the rest of Minneapolis, just showing up and just fighting back against things that they, you know, really believe in. And I think that that's super important. And I just wanna honor his life in any way that I possibly can. And I know that there's no perfect way to do that. So our hearts are heavy. The nursing world is just really stunned by this devastation. So yes, like I said, you can take to social media. You can see all the things that people are posting. All of your favorite nursing creators have been speaking out against this and about this. So go check it out there. You can also check out the full article on nurse.org/nursing News, head over to the nurse.org Instagram. It's nurse_org where you can get the most breaking news that is being posted in real time. So that's that. I'm Alex Pretty. Let's jump over to LND nurse Jen Hamilton. Again, anybody with a cell phone and an Instagram or TikTok account knows who Jen Hamilton is. She called out unsafe staffing and told us a very important question: pregnant mothers, fathers who are They're expecting fathers with their pregnant wife, or any couple who is going, or any human who is going to the hospital expecting to deliver a baby. She gives you a very vital question to ask prior to choosing a place that you're going to deliver. So she quotes on her TikTok post, if you or someone you love is going to give birth in a hospital, there is a question that you need to ask before you go that can determine whether you are likely to have safe care or not. And there are going to be hospitals that are pissed that I'm making this video. But I hope it goes far and wide, end quote. And then she says, but you need to know whether the hospital that you are going to follows AWHONN—that's A-W-H-O-N-N—their safe staffing standards. She said this is very important because you want safe staffing, especially—I mean, any patient should want safe staffing—but especially if you're going to be giving birth, because maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are the highest among developed nations. A research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that U.S. maternal mortality. rates more than doubled between 1999 and 2019, rising from about 13 to over 32 deaths per 100,000 live births. Studies show that understaffing is directly tied to patient mortality and adverse outcomes. Jen Hamilton emphasized, your nurse should be caring for no more than 2 patients ever, and that should be on a bad day. Nurses often find themselves juggling multiple patients. Yes, we know. My goodness. Hoping no one delivers While they're busy with another. So again, what you can do is ask about their safe staffing. Ask if they follow AWHONN standards. She really emphasized that you do not want them to say that they follow guidelines or suggestions. And this is another quote from Jen Hamilton on her post. I did not say guidelines. I did not say suggestions. I said standards. So it's really huge that you clarify that safe staffing, especially for laboring mothers, is huge. You are bringing life into this world or multiple lives. You want to ensure that you have the lowest possibility of any kind of mortality, obviously of your own, of your baby, the highest safety possible. So I love that she gave this advice. I know nothing about labor and delivery. The laboring mom comes into the ED or pregnant mom, we are calling up to labor and delivery so fast. Oh my gosh, get this patient out of here. That is like every ER nurse's worst nightmare other than bedbugs are pregnant women. Okay. So thank you, Jen Hamilton, for giving us that little bit of advice.

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Okay. Love this. Love this. So nurses launch petition to protect public health and immigration enforcement. So the key takeaways for this, as you can find in the article on nurse.org/news, Nurses and nursing leaders are backing a national petition to add public health and human rights safeguards to U.S. immigration enforcement practices. The petition urges public health reforms, protecting healthcare spaces, and ensuring accountability for harmful enforcement. Experts warn that immigration enforcement in and around care settings erodes trust— hello— deters patients from seeking care, and contributes to moral distress among nurses. This is so true. I totally back this. You have to understand You do not want people to distrust going to seek medical care. This is a trickle effect. This affects so many different people, and people should not feel like they are in danger by going to seek care from a doctor, from nurses. And then, yes, as the nurse, this, this is extremely morally distressing being put into a kind of position like this. So I am all for this petition, especially with things that are going on today with immigration. I think this is huge. The petition specifically calls for withholding further funding from immigration and Customs Enforcement, a.k.a. ICE, until reforms are in place. Reforming immigration enforcement practices through a public health and human rights lens with input from frontline clinicians, including ending mass enforcement actions like the Minneapolis operation and training agents to de-escalate confrontations. This is something that they are looking for, for transparent accountability mechanisms for enforcement actions that result in injury, death, or disruption of care. Clear protections from immigration enforcement in healthcare and educational spaces. This is huge. So I love that this is being petitioned, and hopefully we will hear more about this soon. The guide also notes that healthcare workers, quote, have both legal rights and ethical responsibilities to maintain spaces for your patients that are free from immigration enforcement within medical settings. So we will follow this closely and kind of see what comes from this. What nurses can do: nurses who care about this issue can take several concrete steps. Sign and share the petition. Again, find this on nurse.org/news and find all the links. I am talking about here to where you can sign and share the petition to add professional voices to the call for policy safeguards. Contact your federal lawmakers, especially members of the Senate, to express concern about how immigration enforcement practices can intersect with public health. The ANA, the American Nurses Association, has a form to help you reach representatives and senators as well. So go to the nurse.org website, find the links, and contact your senators if this is something that you wish to support and add your name to the petition. All right, let's round this out talking about— been a hot topic, these strikes. 31,000 Kaiser nurses and healthcare workers have officially started their strike across California and Hawaii. We did cover this last week, more about the strikes. If you're interested in hearing why people strike, why people unionize, I have talked about this in previous episodes, so you can go back and listen to those. But as of today, Monday, January 26th, they have officially started their strike. So we will be following this closely. We are looking for safe staffing, always the top, top of the ticket, wages and economic security, retirement security, and bargaining process concerns. So we will be following along with the Kaiser strike and those nurses. We send our support, our love to them. And that's it for this week on Club Nurse, the nurse news, as I am bringing you the most up-to-date and breaking news that is happening in nursing and healthcare. I hope that you found any kind of benefit from this or any education or learn something. It's not easy to always to be, you know, to cover these stories and to talk about it. It can be difficult. And like I said, with all the things going on, especially with Alex Pretty, it's heavy. It's hard to talk about. And there's obviously— I don't know why, but there's a lot of controversy on the internet. I mean, I do know why, but I think that's a conversation for maybe somewhere else. Anyway, my name is Colton Lord. This is Club Nurse, and thank you so much for being here. We'll see you guys next week. Bye.

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank You for being here at Club Nurse. I hope you gained something valuable from today's episode, and if you did, remember to share this episode with someone that you love. Follow me on socials at Nurse Daddies or Colton Lord 17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else.

Love ya. Bye.