EMMC nurses vote on walk-out

BANGOR- Eastern Maine Medical Center is prepared to carry on as usual if unionized nurses call a strike, administrators said Friday.

The hospital will bring nurses in from other states to care for patients for as long as EMMC nurses stay away from the bedside, they said.

“We will operate this hospital the way we operate it today,” declared Helen McKinnon, vice president for support services at the Bangor hospital.

Unionized registered nurses at Maine’s second-largest hospital are in the final days of their three-year contract, and negotiations for a new agreement, which started in July, are getting down to the wire. The current contract expires Sunday night at midnight.

About 870 registered nurses who work at EMMC are members of the Maine State Nurses Association. On Thursday and Friday, about two-thirds of the membership cast ballots with 92 percent of those voting authorizing union officials to call a one-day strike at the hospital if necessary, according to Vanessa Sylvester, a collective bargaining coordinator for MSNA Unit 1.

“It’s obviously a mandate from the nurses here that we need our staffing issues addressed,” Sylvester said at 11:15 p.m. just after all the ballots were counted.

“Nurses are angry that they are not being respected or taken seriously,” said Judy Brown, president of MSNA Unit 1.

Both sides say they have found some common ground, but they remain polarized on two tough issues. The nursing union wants to establish a powerful “professional practice committee” with the authority to set nurse-to-patient staffing ratios at the hospital. Union negotiators also insist the new contract must include language to protect the union from a recent federal ruling that could reduce the number of nurses at the hospital who qualify for union membership.

The hospital says it won’t budge on either issue.

McKinnon and other hospital officials said Friday they were “flabbergasted” at allegations from the Maine State Nurses Association that EMMC jeopardizes patient safety by staffing too few nurses.

Jill McDonald, vice president of communications for the hospital, said Maine hospitals as a group have consistently ranked third in the nation in terms of overall quality in reports issued by the federal Medicare program and second in the nation in a recent ranking from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that finances health care research.

By contrast, she said, hospitals in California, where the MSNA has recently affiliated with a powerful national nurses’ bargaining unit, rank 48th and 50th, respectively, in the two surveys. While MSNA may be strengthened organizationally by the affiliation with the California Nurses Association and its National Nurses Organizing Committee, McDonald said, “California doesn’t have much to teach Maine about patient care quality.”

McDonald said surveys have found no evidence that mandated staffing ratios improve patient care. Rather, she said, hospital administrators must be allowed the flexibility to staff according to patient needs, nurse experience and other factors, and must measure their success on patient outcomes such as length of stay, medical complications and other indicators.

EMMC, she said, pays “scrupulous attention to nationally accepted indicators” and is always looking for ways to improve patient care. The hospital recognizes that nursing is an inherently difficult and stressful profession, she said, and supports nurses with wellness programs, flexible scheduling and other measures in addition to supplying hands-on help to nursing units that find themselves struggling to care for high-need patients.

Nurses also are seeking protection from a recent federal ruling that determined that nurses who have any supervisory duties may be deemed ineligible for union membership by the hospitals that employ them.

“Unions throughout the country are looking for employers to make promises they won’t take advantage of that language,” said Greg Howat, EMMC vice president for human resources. The hospital has no plan to initiate a reduction in the number of union-eligible nurses, he said, but is unwilling to include specific language in the new contract.

Nurse and union representative Brown maintained Friday that understaffing is pervasive at the hospital and that nurses are overtired and unable to do their best work.

“Nurses have been working a lot of overtime. They’re tired. The workload is unmanageable,” she said. “The quality of care we want to deliver to our patients isn’t being delivered.”

Though contract negotiations will continue over the weekend, the nurses were asked to vote Thursday and Friday to determine union members’ support for striking if concessions are not made by Sunday midnight. A decision to strike could be announced as early as Monday morning. By law, the union must give EMMC 10 days to prepare for the walk-out.

Brown said the proposed one-day strike would drive home the message that nurses are committed to protecting patients and controlling their own profession. The nurses currently aren’t considering a longer, open-ended strike, Brown said, because it would be “dissatisfying” to nurses, patients and the public.

“None of us wants to do this,” she said, referring to the possibility of a one-day strike. “We want to get this done this weekend and move on.”

At EMMC, McDonald said the hospital is prepared for whatever comes. “We’ll be open and taking care of patients just as we’ve promised to,” she said. “Whatever happens with this vote, our obligation doesn’t change.”