AGH nurses urge call for staffing, safety improvements as negotiations loom

Citing an ongoing shortage of nurses and concerns for patient safety, the unionized registered nurses of Allegheny General Hospital urged health care workers throughout the region to demand improvements to staffing levels.

At a news conference Wednesday at Allegheny Commons Park North in Pittsburgh, the RNs represented by SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania spoke ahead of contract negotiations. The 1,200 unionized AGH nurses are working under a contract negotiated in 2020. It expires Oct. 13.,2023 Meetings are expected to be held in the coming weeks.

Over the next year, 4,200 union members at six hospitals that are part of the Allegheny Health Network, UPMC and Heritage Valley will be negotiating new contracts. AGH and Allegheny Valley Hospital in Harrison are part of the Allegheny Health Network.

“In 2020, we negotiated a tremendous contract, and yet the past three years have been the most challenging of our careers,” said Katrina Rectenwald, union chapter president. She is an ICU nurse at AGH. “We’ve watched one experienced nurse after another leave. We’ve been short-staffed. We’ve picked up extra shifts and more shifts on top of that. We’ve trained traveling nurses to do our job for three times the pay. We’ve been assaulted and verbally abused by patients and visitors.”

In December, the Western Pennsylvania Regional Chief Medical Officer Consortium, a group of health system leaders, issued a letter to the public condemning a pattern of aggressiveness in hospitals, exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic and the resulting strain on the health care system.

“Nurses are angry, fed up and, quite frankly, we need to see real changes to keep nurses at the bedside,” Rectenwald said.

“They’ve had three years to fix the nursing crisis,” she said. “They have not been able to deliver on that. So we are going to be coming up with the latest solutions for nurses that are formulated by nurses.”

Rectenwald highlighted the Patient Safety Act, which passed in a 119 to 84 vote in the state House of Representatives, as a step toward addressing staffing issues. That legislation, which aims to limit the number of patients who can be assigned to a single nurse, is before the state Senate.

Neurology nurse Bobbi Ozanick said the staffing issues are an ongoing problem nationwide. In some cases, nurses have responded with strikes. Last fall, 15,000 nurses at 15 hospitals in Minnesota held a three-day strike. Afterward, in New York, 17,000 nurses at 12 hospitals threatened to go on strike, and 7,000 of them made it to the picket line.

Dan Laurent, spokesperson for Allegheny Health Network, said AHN respects “the right of our employees to organize and participate in related activities that do not interfere with the operations of our hospitals and our ability to provide high-quality health care services to our patients and the community.

“We are committed to offering employees at every level — including both represented and nonrepresented members of the workforce — wages and benefits that are fair and competitive in the market, and a work-life experience that is fulfilling and conducive to the delivery of high-quality health care services,” Laurent continued in an email.

“We are committed to bargaining in good faith with our represented employees to reach agreements that live up to those standards.”

Cameron Herbst, an oncology registered nurse at AGH, said the health care system is failing patients.

“We are hemorrhaging nurses at the bedside, and we can’t train new nurses quickly enough to meet the needs of patients. This increases the responsibilities and competing demands on a nurse’s time as we are asked to do more and more.

“I know what my patients need. I know how to keep them safe, treat them effectively and offer support, but I just cannot spend the time with them that they need,” Herbst said.

Citing data from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Herbst said, in the past few years, more than 200,000 nurses have left the field and another 20% indicated they might do so by 2027.

“National nursing turnover rates range from 8.8% all the way to 37% depending on geographic location and their specialty,” he said.