Nurses are sounding the alarm on a growing crisis inside the county’s largest psychiatric care facility, one they say is putting the health and safety of their patients at risk on a daily basis.
On Monday, local nurses joined county and state political leaders to call attention to chronic bed closures and staffing shortages at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital.
Many of the hospital staff at the “Speak Out for Mental Health” news conference represented Pennsylvania's largest union of nurses and health care workers, SEIU HealthCare. The union is currently in negotiations to secure pay raises and better nurse-to-patient ratios.
Ten days before a contract between University Hospital in Newark and its nurses is set to expire, the two sides remain at odds mostly over one issue that has had a serious impact on hospitals and their nurses nationwide: patient-to-worker ratios.
Among the demands of the Health Professionals and Allied Employees Local 5089 is the establishment of a 5:1 patient-to-worker ratio, a ratio that union leaders argue will help the hospital recruit and retain nurses and other health care workers. According to the union, New Jersey has about 146,000 nurses licensed in the state, but only about 78,000 nurses are willing to work, with an even smaller percentage of that number working in hospitals.
The nursing crisis plaguing the medical field isn’t a new challenge, but it’s reaching a breaking point.
Increasing demand, an aging workforce and educational bottlenecks have created a perfect storm of high stress and low morale among nurses. As a result, nursing positions across the country remain unfilled, forcing medical institutions to operate at diminished capacity.
Allina Health says it will soon be reducing hours for some of its medical-surgical staff members at Owatonna Hospital, but the Minnesota Nurses Association says the reductions are actually layoffs caused in part by the Mayo Clinic. An Allina Health spokesperson says the nonprofit is trimming the hospital's elective surgery schedule from five to four days a week, resulting in cuts to hours for its registered nurse care coordinator staff. "This change is driven by a substantial decrease in surgical volumes following the departure of Mayo Clinic Health System-Owatonna physicians," the spokesperson said. "We are working with impacted employees to help them understand how this change will affect their schedules and, as appropriate, offer them support with finding other job opportunities within Allina Health." The hospital's union chairs say they're "particularly concerned by the role the Mayo Clinic is playing in this decision and the impact it will have on the Owatonna community," with Mayo handling the hospital's "clinical side" and Allina handling "acute care." The chairs say Mayo no longer supplies the hospital with surgeons, referring patients instead to its Rochester facilities, where most staff aren't union. "Once again, corporate healthcare executives at Mayo who have no connection to the community are making decisions that negatively affect nurses and patients," the chairs wrote in their statement.
Just two weeks after the Visiting Nurse Association of Cape Cod voted to authorize a strike, Cape Cod Healthcare has agreed to a contract that would raise wages for visiting nurses.
According to a press release from Cape Cod Healthcare, the new contract means Cape Cod visiting nurses will have some of the highest wages in the state for home health agencies.
The Visiting Nurses Association of Greater Philadelphia, a nonprofit home health care provider, is shutting its doors after a 138-year run.
All services, including hospice and palliative care, will cease Oct. 28. Complete details on reasons for the closure, and the long-term effects on patients and employees, are scarce at the moment, but in a statement on its website, the organization said “unsustainable financial losses” led to the decision.