Possible strike looms as nurses at St. Joseph in Tacoma seek better staffing, safety

After their contract ended on Halloween, nurses at Tacoma’s St. Joseph Medical Center spent a rainy Friday morning picketing outside the hospital.

The nurses’ union, Washington State Nurses Association or WSNA, has been negotiating with hospital management since August. But Pamela Chandran, director of legal affairs for the union, said there are sticking points. 

“The biggest issues for the St. Joe’s nurses are staffing and safety,” Chandran said. “Those are two places where management has been dragging its feet or offering, at best, watered down, performative proposals.”

Friday’s walk-out was an informational picket. Chandran said the two parties are still bargaining in good faith. 

“We are hoping that that is adequate to tell management, nurses here are serious about needing change,” Chandran said.

The union said it is hopeful nurses won’t strike but said that is on the table. 

Nurses say the hospital is short-staffed, leading to them managing more patients, not getting breaks. (Credit: Lauren Gallup / NWPB)

As nurses carried signs and chanted — calling for better working conditions, some shared why they’re pushing on these sticking points for their contract. Yunna Flenord works as a charge nurse in the hospital’s cardiovascular intensive care unit. On Friday morning, she was coming off a night shift where she said she had to fill multiple roles. 

“I’m exhausted right now,” Flenord said. “I was literally break nurse, [certified nursing assistant], charge nurse, resource, everything last night. I’m running from like three different floors, making sure everybody has everything. No one’s getting their breaks. Everybody’s frustrated, and I’m frustrated.”

Flenord has been working at the hospital for eight years and said that staffing shortages have been a problem since the pandemic.

The short-staffing is impacting patient care, said Teresa Kindell, a nurse in the hospital’s medical telemetry surgical unit. 

“Generally, it means taking on more patients and therefore not giving them the kind of care you would want to,” Kindell said. “Giving them safe care, sure, usually, but not the care that you would want to receive if you were in the hospital.”

Kindell, who is on the bargaining team, said the union has also been pushing for cost of living increases for current staff.

“We don’t seem to be able to retain our staff and keep them, so we’re constantly training new staff, which get great experience and then they move on to somewhere else and take that experience with them and we have to start over from the beginning,” Kindell said.

The hospital responded in writing to questions from NWPB. Regarding wages, the hospital’s Interim President, Sydney Bersante, wrote, “We continue to strive for fair and market competitive pay for all employees and the current contract we are negotiating aims to ensure this remains true for our nurses at St. Joseph Medical Center. 

The hospital’s staffing plans align with Washington state staffing laws and standards through the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI), Bersante said.

The staffing ratios the union is seeking are based on ratios in hospitals in Oregon and California, where Chandran said the parent corporation that owns St. Joe’s, CommonSpirit Health, has hospitals. 

“So, they’ve been living with ratios for over two decades, and we don’t think that the nurses of Washington and the patients that they serve deserve any less,” Chandran said.

The union outlined ratios for the intensive care unit, emergency department and other areas of the hospital on its website. 

The cyclical effect of short-staffing, nurses say, is people leave their jobs because of the harder working conditions that is caused by fewer staff. During one week in October, four nurses quit the hospital, according to the union.

A poll completed in February of this year showed nearly half of workers surveyed said they were likely to leave the profession in the next few years, with the majority citing short-staffing as the primary reason.

The state legislature passed a bill during the last legislative session establishing safe staffing standards by establishing staffing committees in hospitals. 

Hospital management and the union are still bargaining in good faith, but the nurses say if they need to, they will strike. (Credit: Lauren Gallup / NWPB)

There have also been numerous incidents at St. Joe’s that have nurses worried for their own safety.

Just a few weeks ago, Matthew McGuire, a nurse in the emergency department, said he had to disarm a man wielding a knife toward patients and staff, making it seem as though the man would stab them.

“I was trained to be a healthcare worker. I wasn’t trained in self-defense or having to deal with weapons,” McGuire said. “This is not part of the job. It shouldn’t be part of the job.”

The nurses want a metal detector to keep weapons out of the hospital, McGuire said, and a security team that can respond to these situations. He said he has had to disarm a number of patients this year, including firearms, which are not allowed in the hospital. The problem is building-wide, McGuire said, with nurses finding weapons in patients’ rooms.

The hospital will explore implementing a weapons detection system in the emergency department, as a pilot project, Bersante, interim president of St. Joe’s, shared over email. The timing of when is dependent on negotiations, Bersante said. 

The union would like the hospital to implement training and directives for security staff to ensure they are protecting nurses. The union is asking for security guards to have tasers and a security dog. These requests are based on recommendations from the American Hospital Association, Chandran said. 

“Nurses are always going to step up and do the best we can with the resources available. That is 100% part of the job and we’re not looking for some sort of idealized or working where everything’s perfect,” McGuire said. “But there are improvements that can be easily made with the expenditure of a little bit of money.”

Two more bargaining sessions between hospital management and the union have been set for Nov. 13 and 19.