NEW YORK – Negotiations to keep some 10,000 New York City nurses from walking off the job were finalized over the weekend, as some major hospitals were already preparing for a potential strike on Friday by sending ambulances elsewhere and moving some patients, including vulnerable newborns.
The strike could begin early Monday at several private hospitals, including two of the city’s largest: Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, each with more than 1,000 beds.
They and a handful of other hospitals are negotiating with nurses who want raises and an end to what they say are unsustainable restrictions on staffing, nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic.
“New York City hospitals have violated our trust during years of understaffing, and that understaffing has only gotten worse since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” nursing union president Nancy Hagans said at a conference call. print friday. “It’s time for them to come to the table and deliver the safety standards of staffing that nurses and our patients deserve.”
Mount Sinai Nursing Director Fran Cartwright acknowledged that the nurses are thin. But she underlined the disruptive reach of the pandemic in people’s working lives, at their bedside and beyond.
“Our nurses work with patients 24/7, so they feel it and I feel it with them,” she said in an interview. “It takes years after a pandemic to add stability.”
After taking on health risks and huge workloads at the height of the virus crisis, the profession is facing a burnout that has pushed many nurses into other jobs, or at least out of full-time hospital work.
Nurses at a Massachusetts hospital went on strike for nearly 10 months until last January, marking the longest nursing strike in state history. Thousands of nurses in two California hospitals went on strike for a week in May.
The talks took a turn for the worse at Mount Sinai, where the union, the New York State Nurses Association, said management had withdrawn from the negotiating table shortly after midnight and called off negotiations on Friday.
“Shame on Mount Sinai,” Hagans said.
The hospital responded with a statement accusing the union of being “reckless” and “jeopardizing patient care”.
Mount Sinai said it has offered a three-year round of pay raises totaling 19 percent, in line with what the union recently got in interim contract deals it reached with some other hospitals.
Cartwright said the talks stalled as management tried to transition into staffing and the union still wanted to discuss wages. He said management was ready to resume talks once the union was ready to address other issues.
Mount Sinai said it has begun canceling some elective surgeries, rerouted most ambulances and moved some patients, including newborns to intensive care units, from its flagship hospital and two affiliates, Mount Sinai West and Mount Sinai Morningside. Each has around 500 beds.
Cartwright said the flagship was “heartbroken” to have to transfer patients, especially newborns, but would ensure adequate care for them and any remaining patients.
Negotiations also continued at Montefiore and the approximately 850-bed BronxCare Health System, as Flushing Hospital Medical Center reached a tentative agreement with nurses Friday night. Spokesmen for the union and Flushing Hospital, a 300-bed facility in Queens, confirmed the deal. The union said it included staff increases in addition to the same increases in other interim contracts.
Spokespersons for Montefiore and BronxCare did not make immediate comments on Friday.
BronxCare said Thursday it was confident of reaching a deal, while Montefiore senior vice president Joe Solmonese said the nurses are turning down a “generous” offer. He said he mirrored increases the union had agreed to elsewhere, adding 78 more emergency room nurses and making other pay, benefit and staffing increases.
On December 30, one day before the contract was due to expire, the nurses gave 10 days notice for a planned walkout. This notice is legally required to give hospitals time to line up temporary replacements.
A major medical center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, reached a tentative settlement with the union the next day. Maimonides and the University of Richmond Medical Centers reached a tentative agreement Wednesday. The union said Maimonides’ nurses voted Friday to ratify their deal, which Hagans called “the best contract we’ve ever had.”
Nurses are pushing to engage in what they consider standard staffing levels, such as having at least one nurse for each of the sickest patients in the ICU and one nurse for about four patients in a typical medical-surgical unit. .
Meanwhile, negotiations are also underway with four private hospitals in Brooklyn. The nurses have yet to authorize a walkout, even as votes are underway, Hagans said.
