New York City Hospitals Prepare For Strike By Nurses

Negotiations to keep about 10,000 New York City nurses from walking off the job headed into a final weekend as some major hospitals were already preparing Friday for a potential strike by sending ambulances elsewhere and transferring patients, including vulnerable newborns, Jennifer Peltz reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: The walkout could start early Monday at several private hospitals, including two of the city’s biggest: Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, each of which has more than 1,000 beds.

The walkout could start early Monday at several private hospitals, including two of the city’s biggest: Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, each of which has more than 1,000 beds.

They and a handful of other hospitals are bargaining with nurses who want raises and an end to what they say are untenable staffing squeezes, nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic.

“New York City hospitals have violated our trust through years of understaffing, and that understaffing has only gotten worse since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic,” nurses’ union President Nancy Hagans said at a news briefing Friday.

“It’s time they come to the table and deliver the safe staffing standards that nurses and our patients deserve.”

Mount Sinai’s chief nursing officer, Fran Cartwright, acknowledged nurses are stretched thin. But she pointed to the pandemic’s disruptive sweep through people’s working lives, at bedsides and beyond.

“Our nurses are working with patients 24/7, so they’re feeling it, and I’m feeling it with them,” she said in an interview. “It takes years after a pandemic to add stability.”

After shouldering health risks and huge workloads at the peak of the virus crisis, the profession is facing burnout that has driven many nurses into other jobs, or at least away from full-time hospital work.

Nurses at a Massachusetts hospital went on strike for nearly 10 months ending last January, marking the longest nursing walkout in state history. Thousands of nurses at two California hospitals were on strike for a week in May.

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