The United Nurses and Allied Professionals (UNAP) Local 5098, shared its concerns about the unwillingness to effectively staff the hospital, while Lifespan continues to pay its executives millions of dollars a year.
“With healthcare reform going the way it is going right now, staffing has become a major issue,” said Lee Meyers, a registered nurse who has worked for the hospital for 25 years. “We work on the floors, and it’s getting to be with a skeleton crew. We need to have plenty of staff to take care of the very sick people that we are getting now, because people don’t go to the emergency room like they used to.”
“We take care of seven, eight patients that are really intensive care unit type patients,” she said. “That is causing us to burn out quicker, it’s too much handle.”
Debra Page, another registered nurse who has been working for just under four years, shared the sentiment.
“It’s on every level,” she said of the staffing problems. “Its from the minute you walk into the hospital to the minute you leave. You don’t get taken care of as soon as you walk in because we don’t have staff, you don’t get the care you deserve on the floor, I don’t have the time to hold my patient’s hand if their family’s not able to be there when they’re dying. I want to be able to be there and take care of that patient, and I don’t have the time to do that.”
Hospital staff also remarked on how much the climate has changed. Bernadette Means-Tavares is a pediatric nurse, but has also had experience on the patient end. When her daughter was an infant, she spent the first six months of her life at Hasbro, and there’s a huge difference between care now, and care back then.
“[The care she received] is being given, but it’s being given under a lot of stress and restraints. What she got, there’s no comparison to what you’re getting now, what we’re giving now,” she said.
Short staffing isn’t the only issue that UNAP is fighting against, though. In a press release sent out Tuesday, the group revealed that Lifespan not only keeps their hospitals at minimal staff, but is also attempting to cut employee compensation in the new contract that will be drawn up this year.
“Lifespan is seeking to cut its contribution to the retirement security of union employees- a move which would result in the loss of thousands of dollars to a member’s retirement,” the release said. “The hospital wants to make dramatic changes to the union’s health coverage, and is proposing a pay freeze until July 2016.”
Lifespan’s top five executives and officers were paid more than $12 million in 2012, according to the most recent available IRS 990 filings. Helene Macedo, President of UNAP Local 5098 finds these conditions to be inappropriate.
“For years, frontline caregivers have been asked to do more with less while the hospital spent lavishly on high-priced public relations campaigns; millions in salaries for top executives, and on other misplaced priorities,” she said. “It’s time for Lifespan to stop shortchanging healthcare professionals and invest in patient care again.”
Page added that Lifespan has tried to take away many of their rights as employees.
“For the hard work that we do, not only do they want to freeze our pay, not do any sort of cost of living increases, and actually take away benefits from us, including the fact that we have not had a matched 401k in quite so many years,” she said. “They want to limit our healthcare, where we get to get our healthcare, a lot of things that for one of the larger employers in the state, it doesn’t look good for them.”
The union has agreed to continue negotiations with Lifespan throughout July, but the negotiating committee has been given the authorization to deliver a ten-day strike notice if they cannot reach an agreement.
]]>Corporate management decisions by Care New England are hurting quality care, patient satisfaction, and the Rhode Island economy – and damaging the stellar reputation that Women & Infants has built up over decades.
WHEN: Thursday, January 15th, at 3:30 p.m.
WHERE: Women& Infants Hospital, 101 Dudley Street, Providence, Rhode Island
More Background: Management at Care New England, led by CEO Dennis Keefe, has focused their efforts on expanding the Care New England network by affiliating with and sinking money into new facilities. However, patient satisfaction and staff morale at the hospital are down, due to a lack of investment in staff and quality care.
Since 2011, the hospital has consistently brought in out-of-state “Traveler Nurses” instead of hiring local nurses for permanent jobs. These temporary travelers, who are unfamiliar with the hospital, have likely driven down patient satisfaction and quality outcomes.
According to the independent patient-satisfaction auditing agency Press Ganey, patient satisfaction has generally been down since Keefe took over in 2011. Yet despite these worsening outcomes, CEO pay is up. In 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, Keefe made $1,049,426 in total compensation.
Keefe’s decisions to sink money into expanding the network, refusal to hire more permanent local staff, and million dollar salary have all come at the cost of reinvesting in the hospital and achieving high quality outcomes for patients.
]]>“There are many qualified graduates from our numerous nursing programs looking for jobs,” said Patrick Quinn, executive vice president of 1199 SEIU New England, “so it baffles me that Care New England management would take advantage of all the tax breaks of a non-profit but not give back to the community when we have such a high unemployment crisis.”
Care New England is the company presently managing Women & Infants.
Hiring travel nurses means that the salaries leave the state when the nurses are done. There are no savings in terms of wages as travel nurses make two and three times the standard rate of pay. Further, all full-time permanent nurses are given weeks of in house training and orientation that the temporary travel nurses skip. They are simply plugged into scheduling holes without any real orientation or training in hospital specific policies. This creates even more work for the regular staff, who spend time correcting the mistakes of the travel nurses.
Given these issues, why use travel nurses? To avoid hiring more union workers, of course.
This is just another example of a company engaging in dangerous, impractical strategies to avoid treating workers with respect and dignity. Even as the ACA funnels millions of new dollars into the health care industry, private companies, eager to squeeze ever more profits for their shareholders and overpaid CEOs, take shortcuts at the expense of their staff and patients.
My wife and I went to Women and Infants over 20 years ago to have our three children. The experience was top notch, and the nurses were fabulous. To think that the new management might threaten the reputation of such a fine hospital by playing games with the quality of the staff is appalling. As Wendy Laprade, a Registered Nurse in the Labor and Delivery Room said, “Women & Infants… will only remain the premier women’s hospital in Southern New England if we hire and train the next generation of RN’s.”
With all the talk surrounding a new nursing school being built in Rhode Island, and knowing that there will be a huge demand for nurses as the population ages over the next decade, Care New England’s policy decisions seem extremely short-sighted and counterproductive. Currently there are 30-35 traveling nurses estimated to be working at Women & Infants. This Pro Publica piece from 2009 highlights some of the dangers these policies exacerbate.
Supporting the union effort at Women & Infants were several other unions, as well as gubernatorial candidate Clay Pell and many other candidates for office. Also out in full support of the union’s efforts were three of the four hunger strikers, Shelby Maldonado, Mirjaam Parada and Yilenny Ferrares, and other hotel workers who worked so hard for a living wage in Providence, only to be cut down by backroom dealings in the General Assembly.
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