BANGOR, Maine — Just five months after nurses at Eastern Maine Medical Center voted to ratify a new contract, the nurses' union says the hospital is not keeping its end of the bargain.
Nurses delivered a petition to administrators Thursday pressing the hospital to fill staffing shortages — a move they say is months overdue.
When the contract was signed in July, nurses at the Bangor hospital called it "groundbreaking."
"What they had said is that they would reduce the amount of patients for the night nurses and the day nurses, plus add resource nurses," says Cokie Giles, a registered nurse at EMMC and president of the Maine State Nurses' Association.
She describes a "resource nurse" as an extra pair of hands that can aid on-duty nurses in any number of capacities. But she says the promised help has failed to appear, and nurses are still overburdended with as many as seven or more patients at a time.
"We're getting emails and calls all the time from nurses that just can't work these loads," Giles says.
Not surprisingly, several studies have shown that a higher nurse-to-patient ratio can improve patient outcomes.
The nurses' action comes just as eight Maine hospitals — EMMC among them — are being penalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for what they describe as "avoidable infections and complications," a fact cited by the nurses in their petition demanding more staff.
But the senior vice president and chief medical officer at EMMC, Dr. James Raczek, says for the nurses to try and link the CMS report with the hospital's staffing doesn't correlate.
For example, the stats on central line and catheter infections in the CMS report, he says, occurred in the ICU, and critical units have nothing to do with nurse to patient ratios.
"And in those units the nurses there care for anywhere from one to the maximum — two patients," Raczek says.
And he says that other reports give EMMC very high marks in safety.
Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Deborah Sanford says the hospital has hired some 130 new nurses over the course of the year, with a retention rate of about 89 percent. And she says the hospital has implemented new staffing plans of no more than 5 patients per nurse in some areas, and no more than 6 patients per nurse in other areas.
"The staffing plans, we've been actualizing those at an 85 percent rate over the last three months, so no promises have been broken," Sanford says.
But the nurses say they continue to feel the burden on the days when staffing is not adequate, and because lives are at stake, they want EMMC to do better.
The union represents 800 registered nurses at the hospital. More than 200 nurses signed the petition.
