Nurses at Einstein Medical Center authorized a strike in a Thursday vote amid escalating contract negotiations with the Jefferson Health-owned hospital on North Broad Street. Almost all of the 483 nurses who voted approved their bargaining committee to be ready to hand Einstein a 10-day strike notice, the union said. The next contract negotiation session is set for June 19. The union is .
When there aren't enough nurses on the floor, patient care can suffer. And nurses, forced to ration care, can suffer acutely, witnessing this inadequate care and being powerless to fix it.
WHYY
By
As health care workers battled the coronavirus in 2020, the pandemic laid bare issues of nurse staffing at the region’s medical systems. What was a point of debate pre-pandemic became front-and-center as patients suffering from COVID-19 inundated hospitals.
Nurses negotiated new contracts at Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia, Mercy Fitzgerald and Crozer Health hospitals and nursing facilities in Delaware County, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Langhorne last year and staffing grids were the primary concern of union leadership.
Staffing grids are essentially standards that determine how many patients a nurse can take care of in a given hospital unit. For example, in an intensive care unit there may be a 2-1 patient-to-nurse ratio.