BANGOR – Nurses from Eastern Maine Medical Center hand-delivered their official strike notice to a hospital official shortly after 9 a.m. Monday. The walk-out is set to begin at 7 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 11, and end at 7 a.m. Friday, Oct. 12.

By law, the nursing union is required to provide the hospital with a 10-day notice to allow the institution to prepare. There are about 870 nurses in the union at EMMC.

Negotiators from both sides are scheduled to meet once again today with a federal mediator from the National Labor Relations Board to see if the nursing strike can be averted.

Unionized nurses voted last week before negotiations ended on Sunday to give negotiators for the Maine State Nurses Association authority to call a strike if the hospital’s final contract offer was rejected.

At EMMC, President and Chief Executive Officer Deborah Carey Johnson said Monday that the hospital is “hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.” Replacement nurses will be brought in if needed, she said, but she hopes union nurses will be given another opportunity to review and vote on the final offer, which was developed over the weekend.

“We think our nurses deserve the ability to have another vote,” she said. “Right now we have a very good offer on the table, and I think it would be very appealing to many of our nurses.”

Staff nurse and MSNA Unit 1 president Judy Brown said Monday that no one is happy at the prospect of a nursing strike, but she defended the decision to vote last week. Nurses voted knowing the hospital’s offer might change and that the professional practice committee was a top priority, she said.

Negotiators for MSNA have been meeting with hospital officials since July to hammer out a new contract. The nurses’ most recent three-year contract expired at midnight Sunday. Negotiations have addressed a number of thorny issues, including pay and benefits, the appropriate use of electronic technologies and other matters, but the apparent deal-breaker is the nurses’ demand for a “professional practice committee.”

The proposed committee would be composed of only direct-care nurses – no managers or administrators – and would have a powerful voice in deciding how many nurses should be assigned to each nursing unit of the hospital based on patient needs, nurse experience, the availability of support staff and other factors. According to Brown, many units now are routinely short-staffed, overtaxing direct-care nurses and compromising patient safety.

The professional practice committee would have other functions as well.

The hospital has pointed out that every nursing unit already has a committee of direct-care nurses that makes staffing recommendations. The union’s position is that these committees are ineffective, that their recommendations are routinely disregarded, and the creation of a single committee of staff nurses to represent all nursing units is the best way to ensure adequate staff and patient safety.

Johnson said the hospital has no intention of allowing unionized nurses to exclude managers from staffing decisions. Nurse managers are among the hospital’s most experienced employees, and it’s their job to see that units are adequately staffed, she said.

The union’s demand is “very disrespectful,” Johnson said. “It is not the tone or the culture I want here at Eastern Maine Medical Center.”

Johnson said she is unaware of any instances of nurses being harassed.

Johnson said MSNA’s recent affiliation with the California Nurses Association has brought increased hostility to the negotiations, and she is “suspicious” of the organization’s uncompromising approach to the staffing issue.

California is the only state in the country that has adopted mandated nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in hospitals.