Listen to the nurses. Trump’s cuts will hurt care at the VA Medical Center | Opinion

Ann Marie Patterson-Powell, a registered nurse, has cared for veterans at the Durham VA Medical Center for 16 years, but now she is advocating for veterans nationwide..

On Wednesday, she joined other off-duty nurses and community supporters who gathered outside the Durham VA Medical Center to protest a Trump administration plan to cut the Department of Veterans Affairs’ workforce from 482,000 to 399,957, a 17 % reduction..

Doug Collins, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, says the loss of more than 80,000 VA workers will not involve critical jobs and will improve care at VA hospitals.

Patterson-Powell, a nurse representative for National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association of registered nurses, doesn’t think that’s possible. “I don’t know how you can provide better quality of care by cutting staff in an institution that is already understaffed,” she said..

Nurses are organizing to block the cuts, she said. “All our focus right now is to make sure the cuts don’t happen so that we can take care of our veterans,” she said. “They served our country so well and we think they deserve the best care they can possibly get.”

While VA hospitals are understaffed, she said, and the number of patients is growing. The 2022 PACT Act extended VA benefits to troops affected by Agent Orange and other toxic substances. About 1 million disability claims have been approved under the new law.

A shortage of support staff means nurses have to leave their patients to carry food trays, find medical supplies in other units and do other tasks unrelated to nursing, Patterson-Powell said.

“If we’re going through this now, what is going to happen when we’re missing so many more people?” Patterson-Powell said.

About 900 nurses work at the Durham VA Medical Center and its related clinics. The Durham hospital employs 3,700 people and served more than 88,000 veterans in the last fiscal year.

A hospital spokesman, citing a court injunction that has suspended VA staff reductions, declined to comment on how many workers the Durham VA might lose under the Trump administration’s plan.

The hospital’s nurses still perform their tasks, but they also must make up for staff shortages. “Any time taken from my patients to do someone else’s job affects my patients,” she said.

The overwork makes it harder to keep nurses, she said.

“We are going to care for our patient regardless, but it puts nurses at the risk of burnout,” she said. “We have nurses who are eligible for retirement who were probably thinking they could work a few more years and instead are leaving.”

Nurses choose to work at the VA as a calling, not as just a job, Patterson-Powell said. They earn between 75% and 90% of what nurses in other health care settings earn.

“We’re not highly paid,” she said. “We do this because we want to serve the American people, we want to serve the veterans. We could make a lot more money in the private sector than we are making at the VA.”

Many veterans prefer getting care at VA hospitals because the care is tailored to their special needs, she said.

“A lot of veterans come back from active duty with a lot of injuries, missing limbs, a lot of mental health stresses, PTSD,” she said. “Nurses at the VA are trained to handle those types of stressors. Veterans like coming to the VA because they get specialized care, they get the staff that knows how to relate to what is going on with them. It’s not something that is readily available in the community.”

Patterson-Powell is not opposed to reforming the VA, but she can’t accept the current approach.

“The VA can be improved, of course there is always room for improvement,” she said, “but just coming in and cutting staff not knowing what’s going on in the VA, not knowing what we do, not speaking to the staff, not doing adequate research to see where you can have cost savings, and thinking that just cutting staff is the way to do it is not the way to do it.”

This story was originally published April 4, 2025 at 12:29 AM.