Northside nurses protest use of mandatory OT, citing patient concerns

YOUNGSTOWN

Mandatory overtime exhausts nurses and endangers patients, say officials of the Ohio Nurses Association and members of the local Youngstown General Duty Nurses Association that represents registered nurses at ValleyCare Northside Medical Center.

On Wednesday, Northside RNs and their union officials used a news conference to protest mandatory overtime and bring attention to the issues they say it can cause.

Mandatory overtime, the nurses said, violates their work agreement with the hospital, an affiliate of ValleyCare Health System of Ohio.

Fifty-two Northside RNs filed mass grievances over mandatory overtime against Community Health System, which owns Northside and ValleyCare of Ohio.

The grievances were heard by an arbitrator Tuesday and Wednesday at the hospital. The arbitrator will make a binding decision, which could take two to six months, said Molly Ackley, ONA communications director.

Northside officials said all staffing in the hospital is based on the volume and medical needs of patients in accordance with Ohio’s Safe Staffing Law.

“As a practice, we do not use mandatory overtime except in extraordinary situations. In fact, of the approximately 217,000 hours worked by nurses this year, a total of 1,497 were mandatory overtime,” a hospital spokesman said in a news release.

Also, the spokesman said, “When mandatory overtime is worked, nurses receive three times their rate of pay for such time in accordance with the our contract with the Ohio Nurses Association.”

Northside RNs said, however, the use of mandatory overtime is escalating, more than double the use thus far in 2015 than for all of 2014.

Read more about the issue in Thursday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.