Stefanie Ebnal, A Nurse's Fight for a Healthier Health Care System

Stefanie Ebnal, one of the thousands of nurses and health care workers on the front lines of the Providence hospital nurses strike in Portland, Oregon did not start her career as a nurse. Instead, she began in pharmaceutical research, following a scientific path — but never truly feeling connected to the work.

Then in 2002, Stefanie’s life changed when she and her husband lost their baby late term. “It was a life-changing thing for us,” she shared. “I laid in bed for days and days and days not thinking that I had a future. And then one day I got up and I put one foot in front of the other and I decided to do something different.” What inspired her? “The nurses that cared for me… I thought to myself, I could do that. I would be really good at that.”

She went back to nursing school at the University of Portland, where she had done her undergraduate studies. With the help of a scholarship from Providence that came with a service commitment, she dove headfirst into the work.

But two decades later, Stefanie is feeling the burnout. “The sad thing about that motivator… is that today, 20 years later, I don’t feel all those same things because the career itself has taken so much from me… it’s just challenging. It’s challenging to work the long 12-hour shifts, to not only give care to your patients, but the increased charting, making sure that you have all your emails and all of your competencies and all of your everything taken care of. There’s just not enough time in the day to do it all.”

A corporate takeover of our nation’s health care systems has led to a significant rise in costs and drop in quality of care.

Hospital mergers are occurring more frequently both within and across health care markets, leading to higher prices in both cases. According to the American Hospital Association, there were 1,577 hospital mergers from 1998 to 2017. This consolidation, when big hospital systems buy up smaller doctor’s offices, directly drives up the cost of care.

Between 1990 and 2023, hospital prices increased 600% — and just since 2015, hospital prices have increased as much as 31% nationally.

Providence itself is a $30 billion corporation whose top executives make million-dollar salaries while telling Providence employees to spend less and less time with patients and more time trying to drive up profits.

Many of Stefanie’s colleagues are single parents or sole providers for their families, just trying to get by.

She remarks, “We’re not this population of greedy people that are out to make millions of dollars, we want to care for people.”

Striking for two and a half months — without pay — was a challenge. And when the strike ended, the congratulations poured in for reaching an agreement. But the truth is, Stefanie voted no, as did most of her peers.

While many of the smaller hospitals in the Providence system did see their contracts improve, Stefanie instead is coming away at a financial loss.

“It felt like we should be celebrating something that most of us in my professional circle didn’t feel celebratory about.”

The hardest part, perhaps, is returning to a workplace filled with tension. With managers pretending the strike did not happen and an uptick in retaliatory types of communication, the workplace is a vastly different environment post-strike.

“Whether it’s a deep dive into people’s attendance or people’s education requests or vacation requests, things are very different than the way they were…yes, those are the rules, sure, but we didn’t operate this way prior to the strike.”

This shift has not only created a colder environment at Providence but has actually led many of her friends and coworkers to leave.

Still, Stefanie remains grateful. “I have made a living wage and I’ve been able to… have a family and work and do a lot of the things that many women in this country struggle to do. So I am fortunate.” But she adds, “Just because I’m a nurse and I care for people… doesn’t mean that I also shouldn’t fight for competitive wages and better benefits.”

She knows burnout happens in many careers but believes there needs to be more support for health care workers. “Maybe we need to look at sabbaticals… taking time away from hard work to refresh yourself… it seems like you would want your health care providers to be the healthiest of all, right?”