A group of nurses gathered at the Texas Capitol on Thursday (May 12) to bring attention to job safety and nurse-to-patient ratios, Austin ABC affiliate KVUE reported.
Among the demonstrators is Amanda Rose, who recounted to KVUE the trials and tribulations she and other nurses experience at work.
"I've been assaulted by patients hitting me, smacking me, I've been scratched, had blood drawn," Rose said, per the station. "I've seen patients punch nurses, nurses get tackled by patients. We spend a lot of time getting taught how to protect ourselves."
According to KVUE, the Texas Nurses Association is demanding the state implement violence prevention training programs in hospitals.
The nurses also clamored for a decrease in the patient-to-nurse ratio.
"Studies have shown that for every patient a nurse has to take, it increases another patient's mortality by 7%,” Rose, an emergency department nurse, told the station.
Nurse Suzanne Roddel asserted that nurses are underpaid despite the unenviable conditions they face.
KVUE reported that Roddel herself had a patient twist her arm.
“They talk about capping travel nurse company payments when really these CEOs are making millions of dollars every year,” she said, according to the station.
A first-year nurse in Texas makes an average starting salary of about $38 an hour, per the employment website Indeed, KVUE reported.
The protesters told Austin NBC affiliate KXAN that there's rarely any improvement to the nurse-to-patient ratio in Austin and surrounding areas.
They rallied at the Capitol as the U.S.'s COVID-19 death toll is near the 1,000,000th mark.
“As nurses, we are here to take care of people,” Rose said, per KXAN. “And when we are being forced to take more patients than what is safe, the patients suffer, patient mortality goes up, and the nurses, themselves, get burnt out.”