A strange thing happened when your bargaining team pressed the importance of safe break relief coverage. A member of management's team responded that, when Nurses have to take responsibility for a colleague's patients in addition to their own, it requires "two consenting Nurses." What in the world? What is the alternative that is acceptable to them? Exhausted if we do, violating ratios if we don't.

Management puts Nurses in an impossible situation and then says it's our own fault for "consenting" to one of the unacceptable options.

That same member of management's team said that Nurses need to "escalate" reports of understaffing. The notion that Nurses need to inform management of how they are understaffing their own hospital  — and that we are to blame for chronic understaffing —  was simply insulting.

Once again, Nurses are here to the rescue: our proposal for "out of ratio pay" — a penalty fund to compensate nurses who are given assignments that violate nurse-to-patient ratio laws — would provide a much-needed incentive for management to staff safely since existing mechanisms have not been sufficiently compelling. Under our proposal, there's no cost to management if they simply follow the law.

In other news, the employer proposed to raise the bar for incoming participants of the Clin 3 and 4 clinical ladder levels to require a BSN and MSN respectively.  Also, the employer rejected our proposal to commit future potential buyers of our hospital to recognize our Union. They have yet to respond to most of our economic proposals.

How do we make management listen to us and respect Nurses’ concerns? By taking action!

Member Voices

In one of our ICUs, a patient was alarming and alarming and alarming and nobody noticed for a disturbingly long time because Nurses were stretched too thin.

The Nurse assigned to the patient took the break that they were entitled to. And they had to take the break because they were diabetic - it was a matter of survival. The Charge Nurse took over the patient assignment, but the Charge was also assigned to another patient who required a 1:1 sitter. The monitor tech happened to be on break too, and nobody heard the monitor alarm going off. The patient had extubated and had to be reintubated. One of the risks of extubation is brain damage if the patient doesn't receive enough oxygen.

These are the kinds of incidents that can happen when management refuses to provide safe and appropiate break coverage.

— Nancy Pearlman, RN
ICU 3