BANGOR, Maine — Unionized nurses at Eastern Maine Medical Center delivered a petition to the hospital’s parent company Thursday demanding that management live up to staffing agreements they say it made as part of a contract ratified five months ago.
“There is one reason we are here today: Eastern Maine Medical Center has broken the promises that it has made to nurses, our patients and to our community,” EMMC nurse Cokie Giles, president of the Maine State Nurses Association and a co-president of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, said Thursday during a news conference near Eastern Maine Healthcare System’s headquarters in Brewer.
Giles said that nurses decided to send the petition to the management of EMHS after hospital officials said no to their request for higher nurse-to-patient ratios and after the chairwoman of the hospital’s board of trustees declined to meet with them.
“We believe that this is the correct next step to take. We don’t know if this will finally bring the results we’re looking for, but we do know that we will not give up this fight until it is won,” Giles said.
In July, EMMC nurses ratified a three-year contract with the hospital that included staffing improvements in key nursing care areas, they said. Nurses say the agreement called for an additional 30 registered nurses to be hired to address staffing shortages, but that to date, chronic short staffing persists.
Hospital officials, however, said Thursday the contract ratified with the union that represents about 800 registered nurses at EMMC does not specify how many nurses the hospital would hire.
“We never really agreed in contract negotiations on what the number of nurses [would be], but we have hired since May 131 nurses,” EMMC Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Deb Sanford said in an interview after the union’s news conference.
Sanford later said through a spokeswoman that the new hires are a mixture of full-time and part-time registered nurse positions and that 120 nurses have left the hospital’s employ in that time span. She noted the nursing retention rate is 88.5 percent.
“We have an aggressive recruiting plan, and we’re working both at the local level to recruit but also at the national level,” Sanford said.
“I just want to reassure our patients and our community that the care that the nurses are delivering here is safe and high quality. As chief nursing officer, I’m responsible for nursing quality, and I take that responsibility as a top priority,” she said.
The nurses maintained Thursday that the hospital wasn’t keeping the promises it made during contract talks earlier this year.
EMMC registered nurse Jessie Lambert said that EMMC managers now are telling nurses that the staffing agreement “is just a guideline” that is not formally binding on EMMC in any way.
Sanford disagreed.
“We are keeping our promises. Our staffing plans include our resource nurses, and over the last three months, we’ve actually been meeting those staffing plans 85 percent of the time,” she said.
“Given the complexity of care that we have here, it’s unrealistic that we would be meeting those 100 percent of the time, and our plans allow for that flexibility,” she said.
Also on Thursday, the union pointed to a recent report that EMMC, along with seven other Maine hospitals, are being fined for low safety scores that they say could be improved with a higher staffing ratio.
Dr. Jim Raczek, the hospital’s senior vice president and chief medical officer, said Thursday that the hospital is rated by numerous organizations and is safe.
“EMMC is a safe place for patients to receive care,” he said. “For example, the Leapfrog Group has measured us on clinical performance, on patient safety, and we’ve been an A-rated hospital for eight years in a row, and no other large hospital in the state can claim that.”
He further said that the group that conducted the study that resulted in the report released this week “used billing data for some of their measurement, which is really not a great way to measure clinical quality,” and that some of the data used was out of date.
He also noted that EMMC “is a tertiary care referral center, so we get the sickest patients, and that group of patients is going to be more at risk of getting infections or having complications.”
“The science there is not as good as it should be to level out that measurement out against smaller hospitals,” he said.
As part of the contract ratified in July, EMMC registered nurses will receive a 6 percent pay increase over the three years of the agreement, which they said at the time, along with several other economic improvements, will help with retention of experienced registered nurses for the community served by the hospital.