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The nurses’ strike at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts marked its seventh month on Friday, as negotiations between the union and hospital officials continued to deteriorate with no end in sight.
More than 700 nurses left their posts on March 8, citing chronic staffing issues made worse by the pandemic. Despite months of negotiations, the workers, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said the Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare-owned hospital would not respond to their demands. Nurses now hold the record for the longest nursing strike in state history.
“It’s not where we expected it to be,” said Marie Ritacco, 58, who began her nursing career in Saint Vincent in 1983. Ritacco said she and her peers saw the missions become more intense, with more patients to take care of and less auxiliary staff.
Nurses claim that the nurse-to-patient ratio was at an unmanageable level, resulting in a decrease in the quality of care they were able to provide. Staff issues started before the pandemic, and union officials said they had negotiated with the hospital for more than 18 months before voting in favor of the strike.
“Once the pandemic struck, care inside this building became exponentially more difficult to provide,” Ritacco said. “They don’t care about the workers or the people we care for; they worry about their profit margins.
The Massachusetts Nurses Association said nurses were overworked, not receiving proper personal protective equipment and being sidelined in the name of profit margins before and during the pandemic.
Ritacco described situations where nurses had so much to do in a single shift that they were unable to bathe, turn, wash or walk patients. She said a nurse she knew found herself in a situation where she had to choose between protecting a patient who was about to fall out of bed or responding to a call from a patient with chest pain – without any backup in sight.
Being understaffed job after job, day after day “leads to mistakes,” said Ritacco. “This is how patients develop bedsores and urinary tract infections. No one is there to feed them or even hold their hands.”
Covid-19 pushed nurses to their limits as Tenet put workers on leave who could have been transferred to other parts of the hospital that needed more help, the union said. Doctors received bonuses, but nurses did not, he added.
The duration of the strike “is a travesty and serves as an indictment against Tenet Healthcare and its unwavering desire for profit,” said Marlena Pellegrino, nurse in Saint Vincent and co-chair of the nurses’ bargaining unit, in a statement. communicated.
In August, it looked like the strike would end when the two sides agreed to a contract, but things fell apart on the return-to-work policy.
Saint-Vincent hired permanent nurses to replace workers on the picket line and said it could not meet the demand from nurses to return to their exact pre-strike positions. The hospital was not going to remove the new nurses from the positions they “bravely held during the strike,” CEO Carolyn Jackson said.
“The people inside who care for the patients, the travel nurses, the other staff, are doing a great job taking the best possible care,” she said. Adding that the strike had taken its toll on the hospital, she said: “We had to cut services as a result of the strike. In August, we closed 111 beds.
But the hospital failed to come to an agreement with the nurses. Jackson said many complaints from nurses are exaggerated and that she believes the strike was called under false pretenses. She said the strike is a concerted effort by the Massachusetts Nursing Association to get St. Vincent to agree to a maximum patient-to-nurse ratio – an effort the union tried to push statewide in 2018 by the through a voting initiative that ultimately failed.
While Jackson acknowledged that working conditions were strained during the pandemic, she pointed out that according to the hospital, staff ratios never reached an illegal or dangerous range.
She also argued that the union’s staffing demands are impossible to meet. “If every hospital in the state went to a 4-to-1 ratio, you wouldn’t have enough nurses,” she said. “It would exacerbate an already difficult nursing staffing crisis. “
Steve Striffler, professor of anthropology and director of the Labor Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, said similar struggles for staff have escalated over the past decade in hospitals across the country, as corporations private equity firms and other outside investors have taken over more hospitals.
“I don’t think it’s about anything other than cutting costs,” Striffler said, adding that the irony of the nursing shortage is that it’s partly created by nurses leaving. industry due to understaffing issues.
“You can’t spend that much time in understaffed trenches,” he said.
Referring to what happened in St. Vincent in August, Striffler said it was “unheard of for the two sides to come to an agreement, after a very controversial strike, and for them, the employer, to say. : “No, we won’t guarantee you can come back to the job you held.
Ritacco said the fact that nurses across the country are experiencing similar issues makes the fight all the more important.
“What Tenet is trying to do is send a strong message that other nurses shouldn’t be thinking about doing the same. We don’t understand how important it is for us to hold on, ”she said. “It will be an indicator, and we are not going to back down.”
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