Nurses at Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield, Mass., ratified a contract agreement with management Monday.
The agreement covers 130 Baystate Noble nurses represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association. It includes various provisions related to staffing, such as eliminating a requirement that nurses work more than two on-call shifts per week as well as "contract language committing the hospital to comply with the state's ICU law that limits how many patients an ICU nurse can care for at one time," union officials said via news release. The MNA said the agreement also includes "substantially improved health plans" and annual across-the-board wage increases. The pay increase for most nurses would start at 2.2 percent and then decrease to 1.25 percent the following contract years.
The agreement is retroactive to April 1, 2016, the day after the previous contract expired, and runs through March 31, 2020.