Prior overwhelming strike authorization plans led bosses at two Pittsburgh-area hospitals to sign historic contracts covering more than 1,100 nurses and support staffers combined, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania announced.
The pacts, reached within a three-day span of September 9-12, also were pushed into public consciousness by mass demonstrations by the nurses, taking their causes to the hospital customers in their battles with West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh and Allegheny Valley Hospital in suburban Natrona Heights.
New Jersey is expanding its free, universal home visitation program for new mothers to an additional six counties come January, the latest step to improve birth safety in a state with high maternal mortality rates.
The state Department of Children and Families is scheduled to announce Tuesday that it has contracted with two community nursing agencies to coordinate visits with new moms in Somerset, Sussex, Passaic, Hudson, Bergen and Ocean counties starting next year. The program — Family Connects NJ — launched in January 2024 in Cumberland, Gloucester, Mercer, Middlesex and Essex counties.
The Board of Visitors’ Committee on the College at Wise heard a presentation on a proposed Family Nurse Practitioner master’s program, and approved the College at Wise to move ahead with the process of setting up the program.
The Committee also received updates on fall enrollment and Wise programs aimed at local community outreach.
FRAMINGHAM — The union for nurses at Framingham Union Hospital said Monday that inadequate staffing, equipment shortages, and mismanagement are endangering patients at the community hospital, citing at least 30 alleged deficiencies since the beginning of 2024. The Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents nurses and other healthcare professionals at 70% of the state's acute care hospitals, said the problems at Framingham Union and other hospitals owned by for-profit Tenet Healthcare in Massachusetts dwarf the highly publicized ones at the bankrupt Steward Health Care hospitals. Both hospital chains are based in Dallas. "When it comes to issues of staffing, the treatment of nurses, and the care of patients, Tenet Healthcare and the conditions they have created and sustained are significantly worse" than those at Steward, Katie Murphy, the association's president, said at a news conference outside the hospital Monday morning. The alleged deficiencies at Framingham Union included a nurse overseeing six patients simultaneously in the emergency room, two of whom had slow heart rates; a hospital floor not having a nurse in charge; patients lying in their own stool or urine because there was no one to change their linens; and nurses unable to provide adequate pain management as a result of inadequate staffing.
The Research College of Nursing just broke ground on a new Center of Clinical Advancement.
With an ongoing shortage of nurses in the city, and across the country, the school is laying the groundwork for the next generation of nurses in Kansas City.
The new 78,000-square-foot building will allow students to learn with enhanced technology. Nurses will have the chance to practice treating patients using simulation and virtual reality. The school will have the capacity to support growth in enrollment and staff over the next five years.
Nurses always seem to show up where and when they’re needed.
Of course, they staff emergency rooms, ICUs, home health care agencies, community health clinics, and nursing homes worldwide, but they show up elsewhere, too.