Sutter Health nurses in Santa Rosa strike over staffing levels

About 100 nurses and other health care workers, many of them in red scrubs, held up signs and cheered at honking cars outside Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital on Monday for a one-day strike over staffing conditions they say are a danger to patients.

They joined more than 8,000 nurses and other health care workers at 15 Sutter Health medical facilities across Northern California, who hope the strike will put pressure on company executives to address and remedy what the workers are calling low staffing levels in their union contract.

“We’re burned out and tired of not working with the appropriate staff,” said Shannon Minnie, an outpatient care nurse.

She said in her experience as a nurse for 15 years with Sutter, there’s always been a nurse shortage. But the pandemic has exacerbated the problem and burned out the nurses who have been on the front lines of a global health crisis.

“We’re sad that we have to be out here on the line doing this, but we are doing this for our patients,” she said.

A Sutter Health spokeswoman said replacement nurses have been contracted for five days for “guaranteed staffing amid the uncertainty of a widespread work stoppage," but did not answer questions regarding the contract negotiations.

Sutter Health issued a statement in response to the strike on Monday, calling out leaders of the California Nurses Association, or CNA, which represents some Sutter employees.

“By moving forward with today’s costly and disruptive strike, union leadership has made it clear they are willing to put politics above patients and the nurses they represent — despite the intervention of federal mediators and our willingness to bargain in good faith while under threat of a strike,” the statement says.

“Our attention is on providing safe, high-quality care to the patients and communities we’re honored to serve,” the statement continues. “We are confident in our ability to manage this disruption. We are hopeful CNA shares our desire to reach an agreement and enable our nurses to turn their focus back to the patients the union has asked them to walk away from.”

Nurses have been working without a contract since June, and ongoing negotiations with Sutter representatives have been lackluster, according to a news release from the California Nurses Association.

“We’ll bend over backwards and work after-hours because we love our patients,” said Dani Fitzgerald, a labor and delivery nurse, ”so this is really hard.“

Tamara Hinckley, a night nurse who works in the intensive care unit and the chief nurse representative for California Nurses Association, said she and others met with federal mediators on Saturday until midnight in hopes of avoiding a strike, “but no movement was made.”

“We want safe staffing,” she said. That includes workers dedicated to relieving nurses who are taking breaks, she said.

“I mean, we get tired,” Hinckley said. ”We work 12-hour shifts.“

Minnie said short staffing, and the resulting exhaustion for nurses, causes shortcomings in patient care and can lead to potentially life-threatening situations.

You can reach Staff Writer Alana Minkler at 707-526-8511 or alana.minkler@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @alana_minkler.