The scene is one of chaos outside the hospital. An old fire engine, loaded with nurses, parades around the grounds of the hospital. On every street corner, nurses are found with signs notifying the public of their demands and their strike status. Cars and trucks driving by honk their horns in support of the nurses. Members of other unions have joined the nurses on the picket lines. Armed security guards are at every sidewalk entrance around this mammoth-sized hospital. The guards mingle with the protesters at the corner with the largest gathering. There must have been over 200 nurses out that day. Several of the staff physicians stop their cars and speak with the nurses. Television vans with their satellite dishes deployed to the sky are in the median strip. It really is a site to behold. I start interviewing some of the nurses and before long, the chairperson for the collective bargaining branch and the executive director of the D.C. Nurses Association are brought over to me, and we continue the interview.
Inside this 900+ bed hospital, all seems quiet and business as usual. As I walk up to the hospitals entrance, a patient who is being discharged is helped into her car by her husband and a hospital staff member. I enter the hospital’s main entrance and the receptionist greets me with a smile and offers her assistance. I don’t see any more security guards at this time. I tell her that I’m here to do a story about the strike, give her my Suite101.com business card and I am quickly taken to the office of the director of public relations. She’s on her way out the door, but kindly spends 30 minutes with me to address the hospital’s side of the story.
So let me digress for a minute and say that I’m feeling like Tom Brokaw. Boy, are these folks ready to talk to anyone who is willing to hear their side of the story. The problem is, they aren’t talking to or listening to one another. Both are so convinced they know what the other is thinking, yet when you listen, they are saying the same thing! What’s going on here???????
