BALTIMORE — Nurses at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital here held a spirited 24-hour picket line July 24, making history as the first group of organized nurses at a hospital in the city to strike.
National Nurses United, which represents 600 nurses at the hospital, said the strike took place after 18 months of negotiations hasn’t produced a contract. NNU is the largest nurses union in the country, with 225,000 members.
The key issues are safe staffing levels and an end to the hospital’s practice of floating nurses to units they’re not trained in as a way to compensate for insufficient staff.
“Sometimes nurses without training are sent to the ICU and the ICU nurses have to pick up the slack,” intensive care unit nurse Alejandra Martinez told the Militant. “We’re training on the go as we’re working with patients. This results in worse working conditions and worse patient care.”
Martinez said the staffing levels are a life-and-death issue for both workers and their patients. As an ICU nurse she works with patients on dialysis, where the ratio is supposed to be one nurse per patient. But she’s had to monitor as many as three patients at a time. If anything goes wrong while someone is on dialysis, nurses have a matter of minutes to respond before someone might die.
“None of us went into nursing so we could deliver suboptimal care to our patients,” Gary Wilson, an operating-room nurse, told the rally. “We cannot do our jobs without higher staffing levels.”
“When workers come together to fight, it’s not always about dollars and cents, it’s about getting the resources you need to do your jobs,” Courtney Jenkins, the Metropolitan Baltimore AFL-CIO president and former postal worker, told the crowd. “If people come to the ER, they’re coming for an emergency. They can’t afford to wait for hours.”
Niki Horvat, a neonatal intensive care unit nurse and a member of the bargaining team, told the Militant that nurses at Saint Agnes successfully organized into National Nurses United in 2023. She said she’s hopeful. “It’s been a really long journey but we’re not wavering and we’re not going anywhere. “We now have a voice and are not going to be silenced. We’re determined to prioritize our patients instead of their profit.”