Since winning their union election last August, St. Mary Medical Center nurses have been bargaining with owner Trinity for a fair contract that will both protect patients with safe staffing and retain talented nurses. The nurses made significant progress before the COVID crisis hit, but negotiations have stalled. This month, Trinity made cuts to nursing and ancillary staff that are increasing pressure on already overburdened frontline caregivers and, according to the nurses, threatening patient care.
On Thursday, July 30, hundreds of St. Mary Medical Center nurses held an informational picket (an event that helps to raise community awareness). Nurses who attended were either off from work that day or were on a break. The goal was to show Trinity executives in Michigan that they will stand together to do whatever it takes to protect their patients and honor their relationship with the community.
“When COVID first hit, I went outside the hospital and made a video appealing to our community to donate desperately needed PPE,” said PASNAP (Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals) member and Short Stay Unit nurse Bill Engle, RN. “The community responded with thousands of masks, gloves, gowns and face shields. We were overwhelmed by their generosity. Those donations were critical to protecting nurses and other hospital staff. Today, we return the favor by demanding that Trinity invest in basic safe staffing protections that will protect our patients. Our community showed up for us, now we’re showing up for them.”
“We were motivated to unionize after repeatedly advocating, as individual nurses, for evidence-based staffing practices that Trinity used to follow but abandoned because it was bad for their bottom line,” said Bob Bozek, RN, a cardiovascular intensive care unit nurse and PASNAP member. “The data is clear: That decision negatively impacted patient outcomes. Now, as a union, we’re standing together to say that Trinity needs to follow the science, listen to the nurses, and give us the resources we need to care for Bucks County safely.”
Studies show that when nurses have too many patients, care suffers.
“As a maternity nurse, the best part of my job is to create a relationship with my new parents and make sure they are fully comfortable and confident in caring for their newborns when they leave the hospital,” said PASNAP member Beth Redwine, RN, a Mother/Baby nurse. “I am not able to do this to the best of my ability when I have too many couplets to care for. I hate leaving at the end of the day feeling like there was more that I could have done but just didn’t have the time. Our patients deserve to have nurses that are staffed appropriately so that we can continue to deliver the premium care that we are capable of. That is why we are out here today.”
“What brings PASNAP together is our unrelenting advocacy for our patients and the nurses at the bedside,” said PASNAP president Maureen May, RN, who has worked as a direct care nurse for more than 36 years. “We are the care providers. In an increasingly profit-driven business, we are the ones who stand up for our patients.”
“At St. Mary Medical Center, our Mission is to serve our community as a provider of compassionate, transformative and high-quality care,” said Ann D’Antonio, vice president of marketing and communications for Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic. “Despite the many challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and the related financial impact the pandemic has had on St. Mary and other hospitals around the country, we remain fully committed to negotiating in good faith and in the spirit of obtaining a fair, consistent and sustainable contract. We fully recognize and respect our nurses’ rights to gather and demonstrate as these negotiations continue.”
COVID survivor and community member Rico Rodriguez, who was discharged from St. Mary Medical Center in May after 51 days in the hospital, 37 of them on life support, also spoke in support of the nurses he credits with saving his life.
St. Mary nurses want Trinity to guarantee a minimum level of nursing care for each patient and additional measures, such as a transparent and competitive wage scale and reduced healthcare costs to help with nurse retention and, as a result, with safe staffing.
PASNAP represents 8,500 nurses and healthcare professionals across the commonwealth. Approximately 800 of those nurses work at St. Mary.
