Skip to main content
Nurses in Multnomah County’s increasingly deadly jails are working record amounts of mandatory overtime.
Between 2019 and 2022, nurses were forced to work, at most, around 500 hours of overtime per month. This September, that number was more than 1,000 hours, the highest recorded in the five years of data obtained by WW from the county (see chart). Required extra shifts are no longer the exception but the norm, nurses say. The data includes all staff represented by the nurses’ union— primarily frontline nurses.
The rise in mandated overtime coincides with a steady decline in the number of frontline nurses staffing the jail. At the beginning of 2020, there were 58. There are now 43. The pandemic has triggered a vicious cycle: As burned out nurses leave, mandatory overtime becomes more common and hiring replacements becomes more difficult.
The exodus of jail medical staff, from nurses to management, has led to concerns about patient safety, WW has reported (“The Doctor Is Out,” Oct. 11). At the time, six inmates had died in the jail, more than in the five previous years combined.
That total is now seven. Tera Harris, a 53-year-old woman suffering from a chronic health condition, was found dead in her cell last week. She had previously filed a federal lawsuit accusing jail staff of “deliberate indifference” for failing to provide her with adequate medical care. (The county has denied the claims.)
There is no evidence to link short-staffing to any of the deaths. But the jails’ practice of mandating that nurses work second shifts, sometimes with little notice, is considered dangerous enough that it’s outlawed nearly everywhere else.
In 2001, Oregon lawmakers passed a law limiting the practice in hospitals. And in 2019, lawmakers extended some of those protections to state “correctional facilities,” prohibiting supervisors from forcing nurses to work more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period except in limited circumstances.
Arguing in favor of the law, the nurses’ union cited research showing errors in patient care were “three times higher when nurses worked shifts of 12.5 hours or greater.”
As originally written, House Bill 2230 included jails but was later amended to apply only to prisons. Someone familiar with the negotiations tells WW that counties had lobbied for their exclusion behind closed doors. There was no public opposition, although a top official at the Oregon Department of Corrections, which runs the state’s prisons, did note that an early version of the new law would require hiring dozens of additional nurses.
The county health department, through a spokeswoman, says “it continued to increase nursing staffing to combat burnout and staff turnover.” The county recently added 19 positions, which, it told WW last month, “will of course take time to fill.”
As of early October, the number of filled frontline nurse positions had reached a five-year low. The problem could be finding nurses willing to work the grueling hours for lousy pay. Even with the current $4,500 signing bonus, the pay is less than that of comparable positions at some local hospitals—and because of mandatory overtime, the job just isn’t as desirable.
The county is now offering double pay for nurses who work some particularly undesirable shifts. And, ONA spokesman Kevin Mealy says, there will be discussions of “a legislative solution.”