'Disappointing': St. Vincent declines meeting nurses on staffing concerns, says nurses 'spreading false rumors'
WORCESTER ― Nurses at St. Vincent Hospital delivered a petition Wednesday morning to hospital leadership to demand that they fix problems including a severe shortage in staff that nurses claim endanger patients' lives.
The hospital called the accusations "unfounded."
Meanwhile, the state Department of Public Health is conducting an onsite investigation at the hospital, according to department officials. The investigation started Jan. 31 and the agency declined comment, citing an ongoing investigation. It was sparked by complaints received from the Massachusetts Nurses Association about the level of care provided at the hospital.
On another front, the Joint Commission visited nurses in the hospital's emergency room Wednesday, according to Marlena Pellegrino, a registered nurse at St. Vincent for the past 37 years. She also serves as co-chair of the Massachusetts Nurses Association bargaining unit that represents nurses at the hospital.
The Joint Commission accredits psychiatric hospitals in Massachusetts and a call and email to the commission for comment was not immediately returned. St. Vincent has a 12-bed inpatient psychiatric unit.
St. Vincent is owned by for-profit Tenet Healthcare based in Dallas. Tenet reported a gross profit of $15.9 billion in 2022 with an operating income of $2.5 billion in the same year, according to online reports.
Tenet owns MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, where nurses voted last month to unionize. That vote followed allegations of union busting by Tenet.
Meanwhile, MetroWest Medical Center officials told the Framingham City Council last month that it experienced severe financial problems, operating in the red for the past 36 months,
No meeting with hospital leaders
Hospital leadership declined to meet with the handful of nurses that delivered the petition signed by 500 nurses at the hospital, said Pellegrino. The hospital's chief labor relations officer told the group that Chief Nursing Officer Denise Kvapil didn't have time to meet with them.
"We find this disappointing and not surprising because they have refused at every turn to meet us," said Pellegrino moments after she joined nurses to hand deliver the petition.
Nurses claim the hospital is breaking nurse-patient ratios agreed upon in a contract that ended the longest nurses strike in state history. The agreement was reached two years ago after St. Vincent nurses walked out for more than 300 days.
The current contract calls for one nurse for every four or five patients, depending on the unit and how many patients are admitted in the unit, said Pellegrino. However, the ratios are exceeding those numbers because of staff shortages, threatening the safety of patients, according to Pellegrino.
Exacerbating the problem, said Pellegrino, is the lack of any resource nurse on the medical surgical floors. Those nurses run the units and take on no more than two patients, so the rest of the nurses on a floor should have no more than four or five patients. The danger, said Pellegrino, is with no resource nurses, other nurses are having to take on more patients than they can handle. That, nurses argue, is dangerous for patients.
"We have no registered nurses," said Pellegrino. "Nurses should never have five or six patients. There's no safety net." The nurses association claims St. Vincent dropped from more than 800 nurses to around 500, with more than 250 pending vacancies.
Hospital stance: Nurses 'spreading false rumors'
St. Vincent said in a prepared statement that it's following the contract terms that broke the prolonged strike and opposes the association's "publicity stunts" and "spreading false rumors.
"Saint Vincent Hospital remains focused on providing high-quality as well as regionally and nationally recognized healthcare services for our community. We respect our contract with the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) and continue to operate in accordance with the provisions that were mutually agreed upon in the collective bargaining agreement. We take employee complaints seriously, however, the MNA’s accusations are unfounded.
"We do not condone the MNA’s tactics of organizing publicity stunts, spreading false rumors and intimidating our leadership. The MNA’s actions are disrespectful to the dedicated nurses, physicians and staff at Saint Vincent Hospital who prioritize caring for our patients. We hope the MNA will reconsider its approach, and instead collaborate with us, and other systems facing similar staffing shortages, to increase healthcare access for the communities we serve."
No strike possible: Nurses to use legal avenues
Another strike is out of the question at this time, said Pellegrino, because the current contract runs until 2025. "That's not something we want to even think about now. If we don't start now taking care of patients, I don't know what the end game will be for this hospital."
The petition makes several demands: St. Vincent must follow nurse-patient ratios agreed on in the existing contract, hire so-called "travel nurses" to provide temporary relief to full-time staff, and negotiate a bonus program.
If those demands aren't met, Pellegrino said the union will pursue all legal means necessary to achieve its goals.
"We have a contract. If they want to keep us tied up in court, but the community is suffering. No one is winning. Tenet's not winning. Patients are losing, losing their lives. They are losing nurses on a daily basis. Nurses do not want to come to work here, unfortunately. So what is the end game for Tenet?" she said.
More than 600 complaints filed
Nurses filed more than 600 complaints with various regulatory bodies since July that claimed unsafe working conditions. Some nurses were fired, suspended and voluntarily left after speaking out about the challenges inside the hospital, according to the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
The 600 complaints are cause for concern about a staff shortage at St. Vincent, said Paul Hattis, a senior fellow at the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan health care think tank. Hattis stressed he is unfamiliar with staffing levels at St. Vincent, but is generally concerned about for-profit hospitals and their ability to serve patients.
"I'm not a fan of for-profit ownership of any hospital," said Hattis. "I worry the ultimate goal of the these organizations is to make money off health care, rather than advance the traditional nonprofit mission of patient care primarily."
Contact Henry Schwan at henry.schwan@telegram.com. Follow him on X: @henrytelegram.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: St. V declines meeting nurses on staffing, says spreading rumors
