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NEWS & LETTERS, JULY 2003
Tennessee nurses organize
Memphis, Tenn.--Several registered nurses (RNs) at the
Regional Medical Center (the Med) got together and decided that we need a union
to help represent us because we felt like we didn’t have a voice in the care
of the patients, buying equipment and other issues. Administration pulled nurses from one unit to another,
and those nurses were not trained to work in the second unit. If they cut back
housekeeping, nurses have to pick up the slack. If they cut back lab, nurses
have to draw blood. We’re stretched so thin, it makes it difficult to give the
best patient care. Since Baptist Hospital closed in 2000, you have more
patients in the same time period, and you come under the same standards. How can
you deliver the quality of care or the standards of the Med if you’re
overloaded? In critical care the patient-to-nurse ratio is supposed to be two to
one. On several occasions in units like trauma and ICU, there are three patients
to one nurse, which makes it very difficult because there are a lot of things
going on with critical patients. On the floor, the average in the city is between six and
eight to one, and the nurses in the Med are taking as many as 12 patients and
sometimes more. Around the country in medical-surgical, the ratio is between
four and six to one nurse. We want the nurses to be respected in the hospital. We asked SEIU to help us get started. By the early part
of this year, 52% of the number of nurses the Med said they had signed union
cards. The Med said they had 500 nurses, but I’m not even sure that we do. We
did not present the cards because the Med sent out a letter saying that the
board had made a decision that they would not look at cards. They would not
recognize us as a union. To this day the board still has not agreed to meet with
us. The chairman of the board, Lewis Donelson, is
anti-union, which I feel is a conflict of interest because he does seminars to
teach others how to keep a union out. In the 1960s he tried to stop the garbage
collectors from unionizing. His law firm says it helps clients “maintain a
union-free environment”--that’s how he earns a living, so it wouldn’t be
good if where he’s chairman of the board ended up having a union. By having a union the hospital would have to hold to
better standards of care. Right now, their standards are broken at any time, and
we have no one to go to that could help us. With the union they would have to
abide by these standards. We want to have a voice in patient care and to be able
to give better patient care. --Registered nurse |
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