Nurses Strike Appalachian Hospitals for Better Patient Care

[Omaha Steve]

by James Parks, Oct 12, 2007

John L. Lewis is probably turning in his grave. The nurses at the hospitals the legendary labor leader started to help sick miners are on strike because their managers’ policies are endangering patient care.

Some 800 nurses, members of the United American Nurses (UAN), have been on strike at nine Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia since Oct. 1. The nurses are concerned that staffing decisions and rampant mandatory overtime are preventing them from giving patients the best possible care. In contract negotiations, ARH is proposing modest pay raises, but then is demanding to cut holiday pay and increase health care premiums, effectively wiping out the raises.



Says Sarah Hunley, a registered nurse for 37 years at ARH’s hospital in Harlan, Ky.:

We’re being asked to do impossible tasks, to be responsible for too many patients. Some days we have as many as 12 patients to care for. That’s too much for one person to do without making a mistake. I tell my husband who is a retired teacher that if he makes a mistake, he can just erase the board. If a nurse makes a mistake, it could erase someone off the earth.

ARH is trying to impose its last offer, Hunley says. As soon as the nurses walked out, the company brought in replacement nurses—and now is housing some of them in vacant wings of the hospitals.

Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts condemned the practices of the hospital chain’s private owners.

The ARH hospitals are known as the “miners” hospitals’ for a reason—our union founded them to provide care for miners and other people from the coal fields who were being overlooked by the health care system decades ago. It’s outrageous to see that, once again, the people who are supposed to be served by these hospitals are threatened with a lower standard of care because of hospital management’s worship of the bottom line.

Many of these facilities still bear witness to their UMWA origins with photos of John L. Lewis and other UMWA members on their walls. It is outrageous to John L.’s memory for scabs and hired security guards to be paraded in front of his image.

FULL story at link.

http://www.uannurse.org/

[Warpy]

1. Working conditions are brutal

in hospitals across this country. They've been squeezed to death by insurance companies and have cut staffing in order to stay operating. This means that they are dangerous places for patients and nurses, alike, and nursing isn't the only department to feel deep cuts. Consider what cutting the housekeeping staff has done to both make the places dirtier and to push more work onto the backs of overworked nurses.

Consider that 50% of nurses are no longer working in the profession. Most of us left due to brutal working conditions. We got sick of having our licenses in jeopardy every time we went to work because there is simply no way to provide good care to too many patients, especially when we are exhausted and working mandatory extra 12 hour shifts at management's convenience.

The one profession that is overdue for unionization is the nursing profession.

By the way, the scab nurses in this article likely didn't know that's what they'd be when they signed contracts to work in those hospitals for three months. That's how traveling nurses are being abused now, used as strike breakers. Once that contract is signed, they are stuck.