BANGOR – About 30 unionized registered nurses employed by Eastern Maine Medical Center demonstrated outside the Bangor hospital Tuesday morning to draw attention to what they say is chronic understaffing on most patient units.

Hospital officials on Tuesday declined to discuss the staffing issue in detail, but said that nursing care units are staffed appropriately and that nurse employees have adequate input in the matter.

The issue is a cornerstone of contract negotiations, which are scheduled to take place today, tomorrow and Friday. The current three-year contract between the hospital and its full-time RNs will expire Sept. 30.

Tuesday’s event originally was envisioned as a “reverse strike,” according to organizer Vanessa Sylvester of the Maine State Nurses Association, which serves as both a professional association and a union organization. Off-duty nurses had planned a “walk-in” demonstration to volunteer their time to help their overburdened colleagues, she said, but hospital officials made it clear before the Labor Day weekend that the plan was unacceptable.

Instead, the off-duty nurses gathered for about 45 minutes at the corner of State and Hancock streets to show their support for improving the nurse-to-patient staffing ratio.

“Short staffing is chronic at EMMC,” Sylvester said. Some units are worse than others, she said, identifying the intensive care unit, the orthopedic floor and general medical-surgical units as among the worst offenders.

In addition to imposing unrealistic expectations on nurses, short staffing negatively affects patient care and safety, Sylvester said. In the last legislative session, the MSNA, which represents about 1,500 RNs at hospitals and other workplaces across the state, proposed patient safety legislation that would have mandated minimum RN staffing levels, she said. The proposal was defeated – in part, she said, by powerful opposition from EMMC and other hospitals.

Now, MSNA wants EMMC to allow a committee of direct-care nurses to set staffing guidelines.

Lorraine Rodgerson, vice president and chief nursing officer at EMMC, said Tuesday that the hospital would “welcome candid conversation” about the staffing issue during contract negotiations. But, she added, nurses already have input on staffing through small, union-appointed committees of staff nurses from each patient-care unit. The committees meet regularly to make staffing recommendations to their department heads, Rodgerson said, and those nonbinding recommendations, along with considerations of patient needs and nurse experience, guide day-to-day staffing decisions.

Another issue that is generating discontent among staff nurses, according to Sylvester, is the expanded use of computer technology in maintaining patient records.

“There’s some real concern that in the end it’s not that efficient and it takes nurses away from the bedside,” she said.

Rodgerson said making the switch to electronic records represents “a steep learning curve” for some nurses, but said it results in better patient care, more accurate documentation and increased security of medical information.

EMMC, which in 1982 became the first hospital in Maine whose nurses were unionized, currently employs about 1,300 RNs, including part-time and on-call nurses. There are about 836 full-time staff nurses at the hospital, all of whom are represented by the Maine State Nurses Association. Nurses at seven other Maine hospitals are now MSNA members. In September 2006 the organization affiliated with the 70,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.