Labor Strife Hits Hospitals Amid Nursing Shortage

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nysun.com/article/71902

By E.B. SOLOMONT
Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 27, 2008

Nurses at St. Vincent's Hospital are set to picket outside the Greenwich Village hospital today over failing contract negotiations, a phenomenon that is playing out at several hospitals citywide.

Since December, nursing contracts at some of the city's major academic medical centers, including Montefiore Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, Mount Sinai Medical Center, and St. Vincent's, have all expired.

Against the backdrop of a nationwide nursing shortage, some negotiations are turning contentious over disagreements concerning nurse staffing levels. Last week, a group of Mount Sinai nurses picketed outside the Upper East Side hospital, and a similar scene could play out in the coming weeks at NewYork-Presbyterian's Washington Heights campus, according to union officials at the New York State Nurses Association, which represents 35,000 nurses statewide.

"It's just been a trend over the past several weeks here that we've seen with the major medical centers," a union spokesman, Mark Genovese, said of disputes at several hospitals. Hospitals "keep trying to cut corners, and they're trying to force their existing staff to do more with less," he said.

At St. Vincent's, which emerged from bankruptcy last year, a federal mediator has been called in to moderate negotiations set for Friday. In addition to staffing levels, the nurses oppose a practice of temporarily assigning a nurse to a unit, or "floating," which they say compromises patient safety.

FULL 3 page story at link.

[Warpy]

1. 50% of nurses have quit the profession

due to the brutal working conditions. Throwing money at the rest won't change that fact.

There is no nursing shortage in this country. There is only a shortage of nurses willing to wreck their bodies in exploitive and dangerous working conditions.

[Mojorabbit]

2. I wonder if they are floating

floor nurses to critical care units. That would be unsafe. Otherwise floating is part of nursing or was for the twenty years I was one. Nursing is a tough high stress job. I miss it nevertheless.