New York State Nurses Association picket line in front of Montefiore Hospital on E 208th Street in the Bronx, 10 January 2023. This is the original Montefiore building, dating from 1912. Since that time the hospital has been expanding in this area and to other parts of the Bronx as well Westchester and beyond — both new construction and acquisition of existing hospitals, to the point where I don't even know how many "campuses" it has. But with billions of dollars spent on mergers, acquisitions, and expansion — not to mention a topheavy overpaid bureaucracy — it would seem there would also be sufficient budget to have an adequate number of nurses with decent working conditions, salary, benefits, schedules, security, and nurse-to-patient ratio (not to mention adequate space and beds for admitted patients). But apparently that is just not how things are done in the 21st Century. Read more below and HERE.

The three-day strike ended 7:00am Thursday January 12th with a tentative agreement that still must be ratified by the rank and file. This would seem to be a historic turnaround but time will tell. The union said "The agreements with the privately owned, nonprofit hospitals include concrete, enforceable staffing ratios."

On Friday, January 20, Mount Sinai and Montefiore nurses voted overwhelmingly (98% in favor) to ratify their new agreements that increase staffing levels and enforcement, increase salaries by approximately 19% with extra steps and pay over the three-year contract, protected healthcare benefits, and improve pandemic health and safety and community benefits.[5]

New York Times:[1]:

[The Montefiore] work environment often resembled a New York City parking garage, with rolling stretchers stacked several deep. In order to reach patients, nurses have to pull down the rails of the stretchers to squeeze between them. Because of a shortage of poles for intravenous fluid bags, nurses sometimes have to hang the bags from the walls and curtains. One nurse can have as many as 15 patients [about four times the norm], and even more when covering for a colleague who is on break. "You pile the patients in", she said. "You can have a psychiatric patient screaming while you are intubating a patient, right next to each other. It's so dangerous." Last week, she said, one man with abdominal pain had waited in a chair for three hours before staff members realized he was having a heart attack. "You do the best you can," she said. Nurses ... said they were hoping that they could alleviate chronic understaffing by negotiating contracts that mandate that managers adhere to minimum staffing levels. This is the first contract being negotiated since before the pandemic began, and understaffing, long an issue, has grown as a problem as hospitals have failed to replace nurses who have left [or died from Covid; Montefiore has left 700 (out of 3500) pre-Covid nursing positions unfilled] ... [J]ob postings at Montefiore have indicated that it is planning to open "a concierge/executive medicine" service, based at Hudson Yards, a pricey neighborhood on Manhattan's West Side, in search of more patients with commercial insurance."[1]

The Gothamist[2]:

"We're out here today because for four months we got no movement on the 39 proposals we put forward," Judy Gonzalez, the past NYSNA president and an emergency room nurse at Montefiore, said at a press conference outside of the hospital's Moses campus Tuesday morning. "Nearly every single one of them about providing better care for patients in the Bronx, being able to recruit nurses, being able to retain nurses, placing patients in safe environments — not crowded like sardines in an emergency department, not in hallway beds upstairs on stretchers without bathrooms and toilets."[2]

References:

1. 'Chaotic' Scenes Inside 2 New York City Hospitals During Nurses' Strike, Sharon Otterman, New York Times, January 11, 2023.
2. NYC nurses' strike day 2: Montefiore makes staffing offers, while Mount Sinai leaders stay quiet, Caroline Lewis, The Gothamist, January 10, 2023.
3. NYC Nurse Strike Ends as NYSNA Declares Historic Victories at Montefiore and Mount Sinai, New York State Nurses Association, January 12, 2023.
4. Nurses' Strike Ends in New York City After Hospitals Agree to Add Nurses, Sharon Otterman, Joseph Goldstein and Jenny Gross, New York Times, January 12, 2023. The comments section York Times articles are worth reading.
5. NYC Nurse Strike Ends with Groundbreaking Agreements, New York State Nurses Association, January 23, 2023.

Created by Photogallery 3.11 January 25, 2023