Critical conditions for Forum Health takeover by CHS play out this week

By GRACE WYLER

gwyler@vindy.com

youngstown

The saga of the beleaguered Forum Health will continue this week, with workers from two of Forum’s unions set to vote on agreements with the hospital system’s likely new owner.

The fate of Community Health System’s $120 million bid for Forum could also be decided this week. The purchase proposal must be approved by Attorney General Richard Cordray, who said he will likely submit his decision “early this week.”

The sale was approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kay Woods last month.

Members of the Ohio Nurses Association, which represents registered nurses at Forum’s Northside Medical Center in Youngstown and Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Howland, are set to vote today on a tentative agreement with CHS.

The union, whose current contract with Forum expires next July, expressed dissatisfaction with the negotiations.

“The tentative agreement reached between the parties reflects only that the ONA nurses care more deeply about preserving the Forum health-care asset and our health-care choice in the Mahoning and Trumbull county area than for their own personal welfare,” Eric Williams, president of Northside’s Youngstown General Duty Nurses Association said in a statement.

Members of the Service Employees International Union District 1199, which represents workers at Northside and Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren, will also vote on their contracts this week. The SEIU’s current contracts do not expire until 2012.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on vindy.com.