Thousands of nurses across the country went on strike Friday morning, pushing for better patient care by demanding improved work conditions and higher pay.
About 6,500 National Nurses United members at 12 Tenet Healthcare hospitals in California, Arizona and Florida organized a 24-hour strike, which began at 7 a.m., to protest current nurse-to-patient ratios that they contend are burning out employees and making it difficult to provide the best possible care.
In Chicago, more than 2,000 nurses walked off the job after contract negotiations between National Nurses United and the University of Chicago Medical Center broke down on Wednesday night.
“We’re here to advocate for our patients,” said Yajaira Roman, an intensive care unit nurse who works for Tenet Healthcare’s Palmetto General Hospital in Hialeah, Fla., and a member of the union’s bargaining committee. “We’re pretty much urging the hospital to invest in the nurses and take steps to strengthen our recruitment and retention of experienced nurses at the hospital.”
“It’s very difficult to give a patient optimal care if our patient ratio is so high,” Ms. Roman said.
Research shows that with “every patient over four assigned to one nurse in a medical surgical unit, there’s an increase in mortality of 7 percent per patient,” she said, noting her hospital currently allows for eight patients to one nurse.
A strong contract between the union and the hospital, Ms. Roman said, helps ensure that patients receive the best possible care. National Nurses United members in all four states have been working either without a contract or under an expired one. The strikes in Arizona and Florida are the first by registered nurses in those states, the union said.
Fawn Slade, a registered nurse at St. Joseph’s in Tucson and a union member, echoed the concerns about patient ratios.
“If we did not feel that this was necessary to get a strong contract, we would not be out here doing this,” Ms. Slade said.
In Arizona alone, 37,000 people with active registered nurse licenses don’t work as nurses, Ms. Slade said. “We are hopeful that this strong contract will bring those nurses back to the bedside.”
In a statement on Friday, Tenet Healthcare said the company’s top priority “is providing our patients with excellent care, as always.”
“Our hospitals are fully operational with dedicated and experienced nurses, caregivers and supporting staff delivering high-quality, compassionate care throughout today’s one-day strike,” a Tenet spokeswoman said.
The hospital system did not give specific nurse-to-patient ratios, but the spokeswoman said, “Our hospitals are staffed appropriately.”
“The safety of our patients is paramount and staffing decisions are made to support this based on acuity and individualized needs of each patient,” she said.
The University of Chicago Medical Center also brought in temporary nurses to cover its gaps in staffing during the one-day strike, contracting them for five days — a move union members saw as retaliation for the demonstration.
“They chose to lock us out for these five days,” said Talisa Hardin, a registered nurse at the center’s burn unit. She said that the hospital deactivated the badges of striking nurses and removed their parking privileges, and that meant that nurses would lose five days of pay, Ms. Hardin said.
Debi Albert, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, said the temporary nurses, who came in from across the country, would come in only for a five-day contract.
“The competition for those relief nurses was quite high,” Ms. Albert said. The staffing agency used to hire the temporary nurses, she said, indicated to the hospital that “if we wanted to safely staff the hospital for one day, we had to commit to those nurses for five days, or they would not travel.”
In addition to hiring the temporary nurses, the University of Chicago Medical Center moved several patients out of the neonatal intensive care unit, the pediatric intensive care unit and the intensive care unit. The hospital’s emergency room is currently on diversion, meaning ambulances must find somewhere else to go, even if it is the closest one.
“It’s heartbreaking” that they’re moving patients, Ms. Hardin said. “You work in a place and you think that there’s values and that what you do matters, and they do things like take your patients away.”
The nurses at the University of Chicago Medical Center face unsafe working conditions daily, according to Ms. Hardin. She said that units often borrow supplies, equipment and even staff from one another just to make ends meet.
“It’s kind of a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation,” Ms. Hardin said.
The University of Chicago Medical Center, through a spokeswoman, rejected the notion that the hospital was inadequately staffed.
“As in any hospital, we often see unpredictable and sudden increases in demand for care within our inpatient units,” she said. But she noted that the hospital has a group of nurses who can shift between units depending on need.
Speaking in a video message before the strike, Sharon O’Keefe, president of the University of Chicago Medical Center, said Thursday, “We’re disheartened that we had to get to this point.”
The hospital “worked long and hard negotiating with the help of a federal mediator and had hoped union leadership would meet us halfway,” she said. “We now have to focus our efforts on safely operating our hospitals and caring for the patients who depend on us.”
Friday’s nurses’ strikes add to a growing list of union actions that have taken place across the nation recently, including the continuing United Auto Workers strike and the Los Angeles teachers’ strike earlier this year.
