Krista Bernard walks into her work with dementia and Alzheimer’s patients at a state-run veterans’ home in Florence knowing that most days, she’ll be doing the work of two people.
Usually, it means an exhausting shift of running around trying to keep the 11 residents cared for, clean and happy. Sometimes, it means there are not enough hands to help when a memory care resident becomes disoriented and struggles. Sometimes, that means she’s choked, concussed or kicked hard enough to hobble her. Just recently, a resident wrenched her wrist badly enough to warrant an MRI.
She doesn’t fault patients for their illnesses and credits her bosses for help when she’s hurt. It’s an unfortunate reality of a fraught environment — made doubly so by her double duties.
“100%, I believe that, in those instances, if I had a second aide with me and I wasn’t doing it by myself, I don’t think those things would have happened as easily and we would have been able to stop them sooner,” Bernard said.
A hundred miles north, Daniel Berrios wakes at 3 a.m. to ready for another 12-hour shift at a Colorado State Patrol dispatch center in Lakewood. Overtime that was once a nice financial boost that staffers jockeyed for has become mandatory so they can handle call volumes that don’t wane based on manpower. But beyond personal exhaustion and missing his kid’s baseball games, he worries about the people on the other end of his line.
“We have the entire state to cover,” Berrios, a dispatcher at Colorado...
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