Sutter nurses back strike if necessary

Less than five months after the successful launch of Sonoma County’s newest hospital, nurses at the Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital say they’re ready to strike over the staffing shortages and changes to their medical benefits.

Last week, California Nurses Association, which represents 426 registered nurses at Sutter in Santa Rosa, announced that its nurses had voted overwhelmingly in support of authorizing their negotiating team to call a strike if necessary.

The union is currently in contract negotiations with Sutter Health, after the last contract ended in June 2014.

Laura Hinerfeld, a nurse in the hospital’s intensive care unit and a member of the local union negotiating team, said the cooperative spirit that made possible last year’s difficult hospital transition has been damaged.

Hinerfeld said nurses, at Sutter’s request, put off taking vacations in the last six months of 2014 to ensure a smooth transition from the old campus on Chanate Road to the new facility on Mark West Springs Road.

“We worked hard, and Sutter’s bottom line has never been better,” Hinerfeld said.

The vote by local Sutter nurses merely gives the local negotiating team the authority to call a strike if that tactic is deemed necessary, union officials said.

There are no plans for a strike, and the union has not given any notice of such an action, according to a hospital spokesman.

“Talks have been productive around a wide range of issues,” said Shaun Ralston in an email. “Our ultimate goal is to provide competitive wages, benefits ?and job security while reaching a timely agreement. We ?don’t anticipate that our Santa Rosa nurses would support a strike.”

The local threat of a possible strike is the latest action taken by CNA nurses working at Sutter facilities in Northern California. Strike authorization also has previously been approved by nurses at Sutter Roseville Medical Center, Sutter Auburn Faith, Sutter Tracy Community Hospital and Mills-Peninsula Health Services’ two facilities in Burlingame and San Mateo.

Hinerfeld, the Sutter nurse in Santa Rosa, said Sutter has proposed changes to nurses’ health coverage that would eliminate one category of their PPO health plan. That change would shift costs so that nurses in that plan would pay “considerably more than they do now.”

She said co-pays would ?be tripled and Sutter proposes introducing “co-insurance” ?that would significantly increase nurses’ out-of-pocket maxims.

Ralston said Sutter is “encouraging people to move over to an EPO because it’s premium free.” EPO members, like those with an HMO, must use the EPO’s provider network for care.

A PPO, or preferred provider network, is a health plan that contracts with health care providers and hospitals. Members pay less money if they see doctors in the network, and more if the go outside the network.

“We still want to offer a PPO option for those who need it, but the God’s honest truth is it’s going to cost a lot more money,” Ralston said. “We’re still offering premium-free, family covered health insurance through our EPO plan.”

Hinerfeld also raised the issue of nursing shortages that have led to longer wait times for patients. She said that in the old hospital, patient census - the number of inpatients in the hospital on any given day - was very unpredictable.

“Now, they’re constantly full, from day one,” she said. “They’re not staffing enough nursing hours for every nurse on every shift, including the charge nurses, to get all the breaks they are legally obligated to get and that are necessary.”

Hinerfeld said that as a result, patients are waiting longer for services. For example, she said patients will sometimes have to wait longer if they are being transferred from the ICU to the medical/surgical unit.

“It should be easier for them to predict how many nurses they’re going to need to cover a given shift,” she said.

Ralston said the new Sutter hospital emergency department was in fact “extra busy” during the flu season, but so were other hospital emergency departments in the area.

He said the hospital has not been “full.” The hospital, he said, is mandated by law to maintain strict staff-to-patient ratios and there are no proposals “on the table” to change that.