Nurses at St. Mary Medical Center fulfilled their threat to strike Tuesday and Wednesday.
Dozens of nurses took shifts outside of the hospital along Langhorne-Newtown Road in Middletown Township to protest hospital owner Trinity Health and call for a contract that would restore what they believe are proper staffing levels and increase pay to improve retention. The striking nurses were met with beeps and hollars from passing cars and work trucks throughout Wednesday morning.
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Hospital officials said the facility remains operational and has implemented a contingency plan that has allowed for contract nurses to fill posts vacated during the strike.
“We have secured professional, qualified and highly competent agency nurses who are fully oriented to our hospital’s processes and policies, and who are providing care for our patients and support for our physicians and clinical teams. We remain focused on our patients, visitors and colleagues, and ensuring that we maintain uninterrupted access to and from our campus,” a statement from St. Mary Medical Center said.
While the strike was planned for Tuesday and Wednesday, nurses said they will remain outside until Saturday because the hospital has locked them out through the weekend.
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The roungly 775 union nurses that are part of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) voted overwhelmingly last month to authorize their bargaining committee to submit a 10-day strike notice to the hospital if they deemed it necessary, which happened a few days after. The move came after months of negotiations since the nurses unionized last year.
The nurses have called for minimum staffing levels to be baked into a potential new contract. The idea is to create manageable staff to patient ratios at the hospital that has undergone cuts in recent years despite earning more than $50 million in yearly profits.
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“To Trinity, this is all about numbers,” said nurse Bill Engle. “But those numbers are patients—they’re someone’s mother, sister, brother or father. They’re in a bed, experiencing one of the worst moments of their lives. And we, the nurses, have to make decisions—like leaving the room quickly to attend to someone else—we wouldn’t normally have to make because we’re so short-staffed and caring for too many patients. And we carry the weight of those decisions on our shoulders every single day. It’s terrible.”
“When we’re short-staffed, as we always are now, you don’t have the time to truly attend to the patient at the bedside, which is the core of nursing care. It’s the caring in the care. That’s why we’re fighting—to be able to care for our patients. That’s why we became nurses in the first place,” said nurse Sue Lyons.
The strike, which has gained national press attention, comes as the hospital is admitting more and more COVID-19 patients and seeing the emergency room fill up.
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“We aren’t abandoning our community during a pandemic,” hospital nurse Lynn McCarthy said. “We are walking out to protect them.”
A union official said Wednesday morning that the strike has not brought Trinity Health back to the bargaining table.
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“We respect the union members’ right to strike, and we remain committed to negotiating in good faith to reach agreement on a fair, consistent and sustainable initial contract for St. Mary nurses. We look forward to the day productive negotiations can resume,” hospital officials told LevittownNow.com.
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