Action Alert: Solidarity We Stand with St. Vincent’s Nurses
Images of MA Nurses on picket lines
As we prepare for a pending strike by the St. Vincent nurses on March 8, we have created a public web page that folks can share the link to, which allows folks to donate to their strike fund, sign up for a lawn sign or join their picket line. Feel free to share this widely.
www.massnurses.org/StVincentNurses
A fair RN contract to ensure safer staffing for safer patient care for our patients and our community
The registered nurses of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester have been forced to call for a strike in our effort to advocate for safer staffing and safer patient care conditions during the pandemic and beyond.
We have been trying for more than two years to convince our employer, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, to provide desperately needed improvement to staffing and patient care conditions at our hospital, conditions that have only been made worse during the pandemic. In the last year alone, nurses have filed more than 500 official “unsafe staffing” reports where they informed management in real time that patient care conditions jeopardized the safety of their patients. Our nurses report experiencing an increase in patient falls, an increase in patients suffering from preventable bed sores, potentially dangerous delays in patients receiving needed medications and other treatments – all due to lack of appropriate staffing, excessive patient assignments, and cuts to valuable support staff. As a result of these untenable conditions, more than 100 nurses have left the facility, many to UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, which employs many of the staffing practices the nurses are attempting to establish through this negotiation.
Read former Worcester Mayor Raymond Mariano in the Telegram & Gazette writing about how St. Vincent Hospital nurses are on the side of angels, fighting for patient safety: Read article.
Donate
Your donations can help support St. Vincent’s nurses.