For the second consecutive year, the nurses of Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside have demonstrated on what they say to be a critical incapacity to keep nurses, a multi-year trend which, according to them, has eroded the ability of the district of the public hospital to take care of its patients.
Dressed in red scrubs and signs, members of California Nurses demonstrated just before the start of the monthly board of directors of the Tri-City Healthcare District, offering a “security petition in terms of secure endowment” and a “vote without confidence” which accused the direction of “unfair remuneration practices” and violation of nursing nursing ratios which specify the minimum number From nurses recorded by patient per patient, depends on severity.
The emergency nurse, Doris Turner, has retained tears by describing the recent TRI-City difficulties to maintain new nursing graduates when other community providers pay at least $ 10 more, and often $ 20 more, on time.
“I think that the last three years, I guess we have probably hired 25 or 30 new nursing graduates that have passed through the emergencies and that we have trained and fell in love,” said Turner. “We considered them to be part of our family, but I would say that there may be six who stayed because they cannot afford to reimburse $ 100,000 in student and rent loans.”
TRI-CITY had trouble operating in the dark because the Pandemic COVID-19 has seriously highlighted the health care market, which has made many nurses pursue “travelers” missions in other establishments, sometimes in other states, on short-term contracts that could pay double what they could have done during a work of previous personnel. And, after the pandemic, the major systems such as Kaiser Permanent, UC San Diego Health, Scripps Health and Sharp Healthcare have all increased wages considerably, in competition for a smaller basin of nurses and other members of medical staff after many have left the profession due to professional exhaustion.
These are not new problems. They are almost the same as those cited on May 1, 2024, when the same members of the union gathered in the same place in Tri-City. But there have been some new critical developments since then.
Today, the members of the union say that they are particularly unhappy with a new incentive plan which pays certain workers, in particular those of the hospital operations, around $ 20 more per hour than those who work elsewhere in the hospital. Ingrid Corona, a long-standing telemetry nurse in TRI-City and the Syndicat’s main representative of nursing care, said the increases, who have been presented to staff as necessary bonuses to help keep critical workers, have left the collective negotiation process.
“Everyone deserves more money, but you cannot simply choose selectively, in a negotiation unit, to pay more money to certain nurses but not all,” said Corona.
Dr. Gene Ma, chief executive officer of TRI-City, recognized Thursday in an email that the hospital created a “clinical scale” which pays more than the wages negotiated in the process of collective negotiation. Deposit of salary increases for all departments simultaneously, said MA, is “not achievable”.
“The nurses (operating room) received significant salary increases, bringing them to the top of the market, which completely eliminated all open positions or changes,” said my hope was to do so gradually in all units. “
The executive said that the union company opposes this plan, and an insistence which increases “to be immediately in all units or nothing”, interrupted these plans.
“We are going to succumb to their requests and we will withdraw other efforts to implement a ladder,, But they must immediately cease any activity considered by our employees as harassment, threats, intimidation or reprisals, “said MA.
He said that the assertion that most nurses oppose the recent wage stocks of the administration are inaccurate. The hospital, he said, chose to reopen negotiations on the collective agreement of the hospital two years before expiration “to increase wages”, a change which, according to him, was ratified in December 2024.
As they did last year, the nurses said that the Tri-City personnel crisis had often led to fewer nurses were on the spot required by state law. This year, there are new evidence to support these statements. A recently published complaint investigation of California Department of Public Health stipulates that the regulator investigators, who visited the hospital from March 11 to March 14, discovered several cases where nurses in the intensive care unit were assigned to three patients when the state settlement is two.
The standards, according to the report, were “not respected” because TRI-City “failed to guarantee that the nursing / patient ratio was maintained in the intensive care unit according to the standards of practice”.
“This failure has the potential to affect childbirth and quality of care and patient treatment,” said state ratio. “In addition, this failure has the potential to affect the workload and morale of the staff.”
MA said Thursday that although TRI-City regularly meets nursing ratios, staff “call” staff “ – When workers do not arise due to a disease or for personal reasons – During the winter months, caused “certain challenges”.
“When we have had important calls, we now sometimes have to get out of the ratio, and we relate this to CDPH after all the attempts to rectify who were made,” said my.
The state report also mentions a patient who returned to the hospital after a robot assisted operation on his left knee at the end of January with a pain caused by a “tracker pin” which was not removed from the surgical site before its closure. These pins, according to the state report, are “used to guide the robotic arm and ensure precise implant placement”. And the investigators also underlined the cases where “the staff failed to ensure that the orders of a doctor were followed”.
“These failures have the potential to result in the avoidable disappearance of (a patient) and a relief and a compromise comfort of pain for (three other patients),” said the report.
Faced with such serious personnel challenges and, without its own major affiliate of community doctors, TRI-City has requested a partnership with other medical suppliers. At the end of 2023, the Directors of Tri-City chose to form a joint operating agreement UC San Diego Health. Although a proposal has increased tri-tite wages by 20% and increased $ 100 million at the district hospital in order to strengthen its finances, the university would not assume full responsibility for the hospital operations.
These terms have not been deemed strong enough by the leadership of Tri-City To ensure that TRI-City would avoid insolvency and the university stopped negotiations in July 2024.
MA said last July that Tri-City intended to “find the right deal that made the most meaning for this community”. The hospital has hired a private company to help approach potential employees under the non-disclosure agreement and MA said Thursday that a list of candidates and their qualifications will soon be presented to the board of directors of Tri-City.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
