What's at stake as nurses prepare to protest Lower Bucks Hospital?

NOTE: Earlier versions of this story contained inaccuracies. Prime Healthcare, which operates Lower Bucks Hospital is a for-profit health system based in Ontario, California. The hospital's emergency department wait times were misreported and a comment by hospital spokesperson Michelle Aliprantis about the informational picket was mischaracterized.

Nurses at Lower Bucks Hospital say the medical center has dangerously low numbers of medical staff to properly treat patients.

Workers with the union Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, or PASNAP, allege that Lower Bucks owner Prime Healthcare has allowed the hospital to reach "unsafe conditions in which there are not enough registered nurses to meet staffing guidelines."

A protest is scheduled from 6:30 to 10:30 a.m. Monday outside the Bristol Township medical center.

PASNAP manages the collective bargaining agreements for dozens of Lower Bucks Hospital nurses, and those union agreements expired Oct. 12. The nurses said they're most concerned about the patients.

"When nurses are routinely required to care for more patients than is safe, it’s a crisis for both patients, who receive inadequate care, and nurses, who daily risk both their license and mortal injury to care for more patients at a time than is possible to do safely," said PASNAP spokesperson Megan Gorman in a statement.

Lower Bucks Hospital spokesperson Michelle Aliprantis said the hospital would remain open during the informational picket.

"Unfortunately, rather than focus on bargaining a fair contract for our nurses, the union has chosen to picket," Aliprantis said Wednesday. "While we are disappointed that the union has elected to move forward with picketing, we respect their right to do so as part of the negotiation process."

More: Pink's drug-fueled past and backstage ball pits. Six things she revealed in TV interview

More: Police say ex-Doylestown Hospital worker stole more than half-million from charity account

What is Lower Bucks Hospital?

Lower Bucks Hospital has received mixed reviews from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The medical center has a three out of five-star rating from Medicare.gov.

Nationally and statewide, about 3% of people who go to the emergency room leave the hospital because of long wait times. For Lower Bucks, the number was just 1% percent for patients who grew frustrated with ER wait times, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Prime Healthcare purchased Lower Bucks Hospital in 2012, shortly after the previous operators filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. News reports from that time suggested the hospital would close without immediate help from Prime Healthcare.

Located on Bath Road near Silver Lake Park, Lower Bucks Hospital first opened in 1945 and employs more than 600 medical workers, according to Prime Healthcare.

Based in California, Prime operates 45 hospitals in 14 U.S. states.

Studies have shown that the number of nurses has a big impact on mortality rates in hospitals, though it's not known if that's the case in Lower Bucks Hospital.

Researchers have studied hospitals with nurse-to-patient ratios ranging from four patients per nurse to seven patients per nurse in a 2021 paper published by the British Medical Journal. When nurses had more patients, the death rate rose by 16% for every patient in the nurse's workload, according to the study.

Scientists studied deaths at hospitals in Illinois. If all of those hospitals had a four-to-one nurse ratio, researchers concluded that they would have saved more than 1,500 people in a single year.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Nurses allege unsafe conditions at Lower Bucks Hospital