$100,000 A Year Nurses Staff Flushing’s Emergency Room

What’s a dying hospital doing paying emergency room nurses upwards of $100,000 a year?
According to Flushing Hospital’s emergency room charge nurse, such salaries are commonplace there.
"I earn $90,000 a year and other nurses are up to $100,000," said Marianne Ostrander, R.N., in an interview last week with The Queens Courier.
She offered last week to take a cut in salary to help bail out Flushing Hospital.
Ostrander, a bitter critic of New York Hospital Queens’ management of financially-troubled Flushing Hospital, blamed the situation on NYHQ.
"If they were fiscally savvy," she said, "they would have put nurses on lower per diem salaries."
NYHQ admitted salaries—including overtime—do go from $75,000 to $100,000 in Flushing’s emergency room.
Brian Salisbury, spokesperson for NYHQ, angrily rejected Ostrander’s criticism.
"The high salaries are as a result of New York State Nurses Assoc. refusal to back down on salaries," he said. "Why didn’t the nurses offer to cut their salaries during the year we were in negotiation."
Ostrander, along with Dr. Robert Cantu, president of the Medical Staff Society, Dr. Albert Lee and Dr. Sue Phefferblid, emergency room physicians, also complained that millions of dollars have been squandered on medical equipment because of NYHQ policies.
"They keep transferring equipment from Flushing back to New York Hospital Queens," she said. "Then we have to requisition additional supplies."
Ostrander, the emergency room charge nurse, said that last week 65 wheelchairs were ordered returned to NYHQ requiring Flushing to replace the order.
"When we send mouthpieces for intubation to NYHQ for sterilization they aren’t returned to us," she said. "And so we must requisition others at additional expense."
Salisbury denied such a policy existed and that all Flushing equipment was promptly returned to them.