Approximately 600 Registered Nurses at three Dignity Health hospitals — Northridge Hospital Medical Center, St. John’s Regional Medical Center, and St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital — picketed outside the hospitals on April 24 to protect patient safety standards and the quality of care that patients have come to expect over the years**.**

In recent contract negotiations, Dignity has proposed:

• To remove all barriers to subcontracting, giving the hospital the ability to lay off experienced RNs and bring in temporary RNs with no benefits, no job protection, and, hence, few ties to the hospital to keep the RNs striving for excellent patient care.
• Eliminating the RN Union’s ability to take issues brought up in the Patient Care Committee to arbitration if RNs and management can not come to an agreement. The Patient Care Committee is one of the only, if not the most critical, ways a bedside RN has of protecting his or her patients from policies and/or practices that negatively affect patient care.
• Layoff of up to 75 RNs at St. John’s when the hospital can not maintain state mandated nurse-to-patient ratios with the number of RNs they currently employ.

Click here to view a photographic slideshow of the informational pickets.