Nurses at Civista Medical Center are fighting for more staffing at the hospital as contract negotiations continue. Nurses at the hospital feel this is a key point to the contract negotiations, while Civista Medical Center says they have made generous concessions already.
As the ongoing negotiations continue, the 1199SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Healthcare Workers East have organized their “Rally for Safe Staffing” that will take place on Saturday, April 14th at Noon in La Plata between the Charles County Board of Elections building and the Baldus Centre.
“Civista, as part of its good faith negotiations over the past few months, has made major concessions,” Cisivsta Health said in a statement last month. “It has made an offer with no take-backs that maintains the nurses’ above-market premium pay program, annual leave, and an increase to base pay with step increases that will result in a 3.25% increase to the nursing payroll for each of the next three years. This offer is extremely generous, and unheard of in today’s economic climate, when many government workers and private sector employees have gone without any pay increases for the past few years. This year the federal government’s pay raise is expected to be well below one percent.”
Civista’s statement also says the main issue is over employee compensation, not staffing.
“The only disagreements on the table are union demands for increased compensation above and beyond what Civista has offered,” the statement reads. “This is not a staffing issue. Civista has not made any staff reductions and employs a staffing model in line with industry norms. The hospital routinely uses agency nurses to backfill when staff are unavailable to work. The nursing vacancy rate at the hospital is a low four percent.”
However, 1199SEIU says the main issue is nurse staffing. 1199SEIU also organized a website (www.protectingcivistacare.org) which documents letters by multiple nurses which share their stories about understaffing at Civista Medical Center.
““I was working recently on 2 North, a med-surg unit that is opened when the hospital has a high census,” Brittany Bolden, a Registered Nurse, wrote in one of the letters on the website. “They’d just opened it with only two nurses. We had no CNA, secretary or resource nurse [who helps oversee care]. I had to bathe and change all my total care patients, get vital signs and blood sugars, on top of administering blood, passing medications, calling doctors, taking orders and all other nursing duties. It was a night I hope never happens again. That’s why we’re fighting for improved staffing language in our contract negotiations.”
