PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Nicole DeNuccio, Midwife at Woodhull Hospital, on Physician Staffing Crisis and Patient Safety Issues
3:25:48
ยท
4 min
Nicole DeNuccio, a midwife at Woodhull Hospital, testifies about the severe consequences of physician staffing shortages and non-competitive contracts at NYC Health + Hospitals. She details multiple preventable deaths of black and Latino patients due to understaffing, physician burnout, and administrative failures.
- DeNuccio describes a series of perinatal deaths at Woodhull Hospital linked to chronic understaffing and physician shortages.
- She highlights the deaths of three black mothers, one Afro-Latina mother, and two babies (one black, one Latino) as a result of these systemic issues.
- The testimony emphasizes the connection between labor issues, patient safety, and systemic racism in healthcare delivery at H+H facilities.
Nicole DeNuccio
3:25:48
Thank you.
3:25:49
Mhmm.
3:25:50
Honorable committee chairs, nazise Schuman and De La Rosa, thank you for calling this hearing today.
3:25:56
My name is Nicole DeNuccio.
3:25:57
I am a midwife at NYC H and H Woodhall Hospital.
3:26:00
I am here to testify to the fact that the failure of H and H and its subcontractor employers to offer fair and competitive contracts to its physicians is not only a labor issue, but also a patient safety issue and an issue of systemic racism and medical apartheid.
3:26:15
At Woodhull Hospital, we continue to grapple with an increasing and devastating series of perinatal deaths in our care in recent years, all of which can be linked to issues of chronic understaffing and physician staffing shortages from the crisis of recruitment and retention, a dire situation that clinicians in our service have sounded the alarms about to our hospital administration for years.
3:26:34
The crisis has been deepened by a corporate style takeover of our current OBGYN leadership in 2023 using an autocratic and punitive leadership style that has sought to weed out staff who are not loyal to them by making it a hostile environment for them to work, blaming and punishing individual clinicians and scapegoating midwifery care for adverse outcomes that are truly rooted in underfunding and other systemic issues, and thus failing to address the real root causes of preventable death and iatrogenic harm to the people we are supposed to serve.
3:27:02
The most egregious and unforgivable harm caused by this crisis is the preventable deaths in recent years of 3 black mothers, one of them Afro Latina as well as the other intrapartum deaths of a black baby and a Latino baby.
3:27:15
In addition, the numbers of people that have suffered preventable morbidity due to this crisis at Woodhull Hospital are far more numerous and warrant further investigation.
3:27:24
During the COVID pandemic, my OBGYN physician colleagues took it upon themselves to take more shifts beyond their contract obligations to meet the need.
3:27:31
Simultaneously, a crisis of recruitment and retention in Woodhull's anesthesiology department due to severely noncompetitive pay allowed a dangerous anesthesiologist to remain in practice despite multiple reported safety concerns.
3:27:42
In 2020, black mother Shaija Semple was killed by a fatal error by this anesthesiologist.
3:27:48
Since that time, the anesthesia department at Woodhull has been overhauled, but this action came too late for the life of miss Semple.
3:27:53
As the crisis of physician shortages and chronic burnout deepened in March 2023, Woodhall OBGYN physicians issued a collective plea for help to the Woodhall Hospital, H and H, and NYU Langone Affiliate Administrations, flagging the dire situation and demanding active physician recruitment, competitive pay to make recruitment efforts viable, and the temporary hiring of locum tenens physicians to fill coverage gaps and prevent more physicians from leaving or reaching dangerous levels of burnout.
3:28:19
These demands were not acted upon by the administration.
3:28:22
Physicians were also forced to work shifts that that they did not feel were safe for them to work.
3:28:26
One key example being an OB physician in his seventies who faced health complications who requested not to be scheduled on the night shift.
Mercedes Narcisse
3:28:32
Please just summarize, please.
3:28:34
Pardon me?
3:28:35
Please summarize because your time is up.
Nicole DeNuccio
3:28:37
Summarize.
3:28:37
Okay.
3:28:38
Sure.
3:28:38
I I have I'm sorry.
3:28:40
I have 2 more human lives that have been lost to discuss.
3:28:44
In September 2023, issues with unsafe staffing ratios and cultural norms formed in the setting of chronic of chronic understaffing and burnout contributed to the substandard monitoring care that a black mother in labor received leading up to the death of her baby that day.
3:28:58
In October 2023, a Latina mother lost her baby and uterus in labor to a uterine rupture.
3:29:03
An OB attending worked sick with a packed surgical schedule that day and handed off the floor that night to the same attending who did not feel it was safe for him to work at night.
3:29:11
Delays in this mother's cesarean birth resulted in the death of her baby and loss of her uterus.
3:29:15
The following morning, this attending again expressed his dismay that the safety concern was not honored.
3:29:20
2 weeks later, he remained scheduled for a night shift, and that night he made a fatal surgical error error and post surgical management decisions that resulted in the death of black mother Christine Fields.
3:29:30
Some demands in the decision's March 2023 letter have now been met, but, again, far too late and only in response to these catastrophic losses.
3:29:38
In 2024, again, the administration's prioritization of their bottom line over the lives of black and brown people came with deadly consequences when a locum tenens physician had been reported for unsafe practice remained on the OB schedule months later.
3:29:51
Using up the remaining funds in our contract You
Mercedes Narcisse
3:29:53
already have 3 of you?
Nicole DeNuccio
3:29:55
I'm sorry.
3:29:56
I wanted to mention that as a result of this decision, Afro Latina mother, Beverly Garcia, Barrios' care, let received she received substandard monitoring and delays in in in her necessary cesarean birth during which she died later that day.
3:30:13
The case study of Woodhol's OBGYN service is a warning to
Mercedes Narcisse
3:30:17
you testimony with us.
Nicole DeNuccio
3:30:19
I will.
3:30:20
I stand with the H and H physicians who have appropriately recognized the severity of this crisis.