Hello fellow Nurse, this is your weekly handoff. Some quick and dirty nursing news that’s worth sharing. Enjoy!

Something to absolutely not believe

After 411 days on the picket line, the Henry Ford Genesys nurses' strike is finally over. About 750 Teamsters Local 332 nurses and case workers in Grand Blanc, Michigan ratified a three-year contract on October 16. Here's the part you won't believe: the 13% raise in the deal was reportedly already on the table back in March, and the nurse-to-patient ratios were simply carried over from the old contract. The hospital says more than 350 nurses worked through the strike or were hired after it started, and who gets their old shifts back is still unresolved. Over a year of lost paychecks, and the finish line looks a lot like where things stood months ago.

Something to make you furious

Ready to be mad? A new nurse.org analysis of hospital pay found the median CEO at 118 large nonprofit health systems took home about $4.9 million in 2024, and 17 of them cleared $10 million. The top earner, at NewYork-Presbyterian, pulled in more than $26 million. Systemwide chief nursing officers at 36 nonprofit systems had a median compensation of roughly $846,000, while the median RN earns about $93,600 a year. So the next time someone in the boardroom says there's no money for safe staffing, you know where to look.

Something to make us nurses proud

Sometimes the hero is the person you least expect to be in the right place. After a football game at Allan Trimble Stadium in Jenks, Oklahoma, a man fainted and hit his head on a curb, severing an artery in the fall. Chelsea Franklin, the school nurse at Jenks West Elementary, applied pressure to the wound and stayed with him until paramedics took over. Jenks Public Schools gave her its Excellence in Safety Award, and the man and his daughters showed up to thank her in person. That's what a nurse does when the bleeding starts and no one else knows what to do.

Something from a Subscriber

“I've been an ER nurse for eleven years and I'm not a crier. But last month one of our regulars, an older gentleman who comes in every few weeks with the same vague complaint, mostly because his house is quiet and our waiting room isn't, showed up with a card for the whole department. Night shift keeps a stash of the good crackers just for him, and he knows it.

He'd hand-written a thank-you to each of us, by first name, and got every one right, including the new grad who'd only been with us two weeks. Then he asked if he could sit at the nurses' station for twenty minutes 'just to be around people.' Of course we said yes. The charge nurse pulled up a chair, someone got him a coffee, and for a few minutes the busiest ER in the county stopped being a zoo.

I've worked a lot of twelves that left me wrecked. That one reminded me why I stayed.”

— Danielle R., ER Nurse, Ohio

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