Nurses working at St. Agnes Ascension Hospital picketed outside the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore Tuesday demanding better staffing and pay.
It’s been nearly a year since the nurses at the hospital voted to unionize, but management and workers still have yet to come to a contract agreement.
The nurses say they are chronically understaffed and have a retention problem that is partly due to poor pay.
“In ICU, we usually do one nurse for every two patients,” Melissa LaRue, an ICU nurse at St. Agnes said. “St. Agnes has been cutting that and at times we've had to take care of three patients instead of two. We feel like we're being put in unsafe situations for our patients.”
Ascension hospitals all over the nation have been criticized for their staffing model. In 2022, The New York Times conducted an investigation that found the company created its own staffing crisis before COVID put pressure on the healthcare system, stating that many “cut staff to skeletal levels” that compromised patient safety.
Ascension did not respond to WYPR for comment, but it did respond to the NYT piece in 2022.
“Ascension is deeply committed to providing a positive workplace culture for our nurses, as well as other clinicians and associates,” the December 2022 blog post states. “Unlike what The New York Times has indicated that it was told, the reality is that Ascension’s hospital staffing levels – particularly bedside nursing staffing — increased in the years leading up to the pandemic and continue to exceed levels maintained by the majority of our peers.”
However, nurses in Baltimore say they don’t feel like they have the staffing they need to keep patients safe.
The nurses are asking for safe staffing, floating clusters, increase in pay for RNs and articles that would protect nurses in new graduate orientation.
Baltimore City Council President-elect Zeke Cohen said at the rally that the council will support the nurses.
“We have a proud history of unionization in this city,” he said. “It is critically important for folks to know that Baltimore is a hard-working, scrappy, gritty labor town and it's going to stay that way.”
Nurses working at Ascension in Texas and Kansas finished labor contract negotiations with administrators earlier this year.
