Nurses To Picket At UMass Memorial Medical Center
Nurses plan to picket at UMass Memorial Medical Center's (UMMMC) Belmont Street campus on Thursday to protest what they see as unsafe staffing levels, according to the Massachusetts Nursing Association (MNA).
The union said it has been in negotiations with UMMMC for a new contract for nearly a year, "with little progress" on nurse staffing levels. The union said working conditions are deteriorating at the University and Memorial/Hahnemann campuses, characterized by "a lack of resources" and "untenable" patient loads.
The union claims UMMMC has gone from having the best staffing levels in the city to the worst in most of their units, and points to a report released last month by the federal Medicare program that showed the UMass Memorial system listed among the 10 hospitals in the state receiving the highest penalties for readmissions of post-discharge patients.
The union said the hospital's negotiators are also seeking to trim pension benefits and increase the cost of health insurance.
The union is asking the hospital to retract its demands for benefits concessions and to provide contractually-guaranteed nurse-to-patient ratios.
Robert Brogna, a UMMMC spokesman, said in an email Wednesday afternoon that "patient safety and quality care are at the forefront of every decision we make."
"We recently undertook a careful review of service lines where fewer people are using our services than in the past, often due to demographic shifts, and where we don’t expect to see an improvement in volume, and staff reductions were made accordingly. It’s a fact that if we don’t adjust our costs to align with that reality, we will not have a sustainable financial underpinning," Brogna wrote.
He added that administrators have procedures in place to increase staffing levels in times of higher demand.
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