Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the union representing 3,300 of its nurses said they reached tentative agreement on a new contract, averting what would have been the largest nurses strike in state history. The compromise came early Sunday morning after 15 hours of negotiations, ending a long and bitter bargaining process between the Massachusetts Nurses Association and one of the city’s biggest teaching hospitals.
With their seven-day strike having ended Sunday, Allina Health hospital nurses started returning to work at 7 a.m., and many expressed relief at the thought of being back on the wards. The strike produced plenty of accusations but little apparent progress toward a new contract, and what happens next for the five hospitals and 4,800 nurses isn’t quite clear.
A replacement nurse from Georgia stopped working at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids Wednesday, citing concerns about the quality of patient care while the hospital’s regular nurses are on strike. Allina Health replaced its 4,800 regular nurses at Mercy and four other Twin Cities hospitals with 1,400 temporary nurses when a seven-day strike started Sunday morning.
Allina Health’s $108 million investment in a medical data company has emerged as a simmering frustration for striking Twin Cities nurses, especially when the health system is trying to save money by phasing out the nurses’ preferred health insurance.
Allina Health said Monday that employees are performing with professionalism and compassion at its five Twin Cities hospitals where nurses are on strike, but the nurses union said it is collecting reports of patient care problems and will assist in reporting them to state regulators.
UCLA and Harvard Medical School researchers say their analysis dispels commonly held beliefs among physicians that “advanced-practice clinicians” provide lesser quality care than doctors while ordering up more unneeded care like X-rays or unnecessary antibiotics.