Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Mass., and the union representing 800 nurses at the facility will resume negotiations April 26, the first talks since nurses went on strike March 8, according to both sides.
A federal mediator scheduled the talks April 23, after discussions with the Massachusetts Nurses Association and Saint Vincent, the union said. The hospital is part of Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare.
"We will negotiate as hard and long as it takes to reach an agreement and get back where we have always belonged — at the bedside caring for our patients and the community we have served with pride for so many years," Marlena Pellegrino, a longtime nurse at the hospital and co-chair of the nurses local bargaining unit of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said in a news release.
The scheduled negotiations come during the eighth week of the strike.
The Massachusetts Nurses Association seeks a 4-1 patient-to-nurse ratio on medical/surgical floors and telemetry units, in most cases, with a resource nurse as needed to coordinate care and provide support with complex cases. The union also seeks more emergency department staffing and more nurses to help with urgent and critical situations on the medical/surgical floors.
The hospital says the union's staffing demands are unreasonable. The hospital said it has offered expanding a 4-1 patient-to-nurse ratio to three of eight medical/surgical floors, a critical care float nurse who would always be available, and ensuring a nurse on a med-surg floor does not have more than four COVID-19 patients at given time, the Telegram & Gazette reported April 3. The hospital also said it has offered a generous wage and benefit proposal, according to the newspaper.