43
52 filed mass grievances against the hospital
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.
“I am concerned for the safety of our patients and my fellow nurses because of the hospital’s increased reliance on mandatory overtime,” said Laurie Hornberger, who has been an RN at Northside for five years and worked at the hospital for 10 years.
She said in March she started her 12-hour shift in the telemetry unit at 7 a.m. but ended up having to work 16 hours because there weren’t enough nurses to cover the shift. In addition, she said she was assigned six patients when research shows that five should be the maximum workload.
“By 5:30 p.m. I was already mentally exhausted. Northside’s nurse staffing problem had suddenly become my problem,” Hornberger said.
Jeannie Mulichak, a RN who has worked at Northside for 35 years, said Institute of Medicine Guidelines says nurses should work no more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period and no more than 60 hours in a seven-day period.
Mulichak quoted fellow nurses.
One said: “I have worked back-to-back shifts with no lunch and no breaks. Northside is using mandatory overtime to staff our department.”
“Our [unit] schedule came out recently. We have 15 nurses. A year ago we had 30 nurses,” another said.
Northside’s complement of RNs is 290 compared with 410 a year ago, Ackley said.
Registered nurses ordered to accept mandatory overtime are paid triple their regular rate.
The YGDNA has no problems with nurses who volunteer for overtime, for which they do not receive triple-time pay, said Linda Warino, executive director of ONA’s District 3.
Warino said, however, nurses can be disciplined for refusing a direct order to work overtime.
“We can file a grievance, but by the time it is resolved, it is too late,” she said.
In an unrelated matter, YGDNA’s work agreement with Northside expired Feb. 27, but the union has agreed to several contract extensions. The next scheduled negotiating session is Friday beginning at 9:30 a.m., Warino said.