The registered nurses of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester were forced by a giant for-profit corporation to begin an open-ended strike on March 8 as we 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.
Media Coverage
Click here to see the tremendous local, state and national media coverage of the St. Vincent Hospital nurse strike.
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