Nurses want say on care ; Group is rebuffed by U Missouri negotiators.

[Omaha Steve]

No link.

Nurses want say on care ; Group is rebuffed by UM negotiators.
T.J. GREANEY, T.J. GREANEY of the Tribune's staff

Some registered nurses in the University of Missouri system say they're understaffed, underpaid and their professional judgments are increasingly ignored.

"This is about respect and dignity. ... They want them to respect them and preserve the dignity of the registered nurse. That doesn't cost this hospital one red cent," said Stella Lindsey, a labor relations representative with the Missouri Nurses Association.

Members of the association are pushing to revise their labor agreement, which they say has been unchanged since the early 1980s. Officers from the group's negotiating team met last night at the Columbia Public Library to discuss their next move in ongoing negotiations with UM Human Resources.

The association known as MONA represents 864 nurses in the system, including nurses working at Columbia Regional Hospital, Ellis Fischel Cancer Center and University Hospital.

Though all registered nurses in the system are nominally represented by the association, a small minority are active, dues- paying members. MONA, a 100-year-old organization, has tried to flex its muscles locally in the past two years.

Active members say that during that time span, the university has hired an alarming number of "travelers," or temporary agency nurses, and turned a deaf ear to complaints from nurses that patient loads are too high.

"If this continues, we'll see that we have more travelers instead of registered nurses, and we'll have people not wanting to work at the University of Missouri because the standards are not higher for us," said Allison Kellenberger, a staff nurse with the cardiology unit at University Hospital who has worked there 13 of her 20 years in nursing. "It's a patient safety issue, because it means not having a professional nurse by the bedside."

Another complaint voiced by nurses is that language in their 20- year-old contract does not include "fundamental" professional rights laid out by the American Nurses Association. These are meant to give nurses a say in patient treatment and the appropriate staffing levels.

"If the employer hands down an unsafe staffing situation where the judgment of the professional registered nurse is that this is unsafe - too many patients - they need to be able to say and advocate for their patient by saying, `This is not correct; we need to make this better,' " Lindsey said.

The association wants the new contract to include the ANA's "principles of staffing," that would force the university to conduct ongoing assessments of turnover rates, overtime rates, nurse satisfaction and the use of supplemental staff.

"There is no reference to professional staff in the current labor contract. They categorize nurses as service employees," Lindsey said. "Nurses are under state law and state licensure. Your cafeteria worker, your janitor, your lawnmower guy doesn't have to work under that, but nurses are classified with them."

Nurses on the negotiating team said they spent "hundreds of hours" earlier this year drawing up a new labor agreement that they submitted May 27. UM negotiators led by Blake Danuser, associate vice president for employee relations, returned last month with what nurses call a vastly stripped-down counterproposal that they say was nearly identical to the original contract.

"We thought we'd get counterproposals, but what we got was the same document returned to us with a few changes of titles and vocabulary," said Kellenberger, a nurse on the negotiating team.

Contacted this morning, Danuser declined to comment on the negotiations, citing "meet and confer" laws.

Nurses also say they need annual pay raises that take into account regional salary averages and cost-of-living increases. Nurses this year received a 2 percent raise supplemented by a raise tied to performance evaluation.

"We're falling behind every year," Kellenberger said.

[Warpy]

1. Next week they'll be wringing their hands about a nursing shortage

and begging for more H1B visa nurses and for green cards for the ones they're working to death now.

50% of the RNs in this country have been driven out of practice mostly due to brutal working conditions. There is no real nursing shortage.

There is just stupid, greedy, and short sighted management.