The 16-bed Post-Anesthesia Care Unit at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, where patients go after coming out of surgery, is supposed to have at least eight nurses on its 11 a.m. shift to perform tasks like monitoring vital signs and doling out pain medication.
That’s the number Mount Sinai agreed to in its contract with the New York State Nurses Association.
But the hospital failed to meet that minimum 203 times last year, including 36 days when there were just four or five nurses available, an arbitrator found when deciding a case brought by unionized nurses at the hospital.
On Jan. 7, the arbitrator ordered Mount Sinai to pay a penalty of nearly $250,000 for chronic understaffing in violation of the union contract, despite acknowledging that the hospital “made good-faith efforts to recruit and hire additional nurses.”
The New York State Nurses Association and the Federation of Nurses/UFT say that for the first time in 2023, they began securing cash payments over complaints about understaffing. The awards must be paid out to nurses who worked those understaffed shifts.
The New York State Nurses Association has won nearly $1 million in six separate penalties against Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Morningside and Montefiore Medical Center since May. The Federation of Nurses/UFT won financial awards in two additional cases against NYU Langone Brooklyn last month, but the amounts still have to be calculated. Arbitration cases are not public and there may be others that have not been reported.
The unions, which represent a combined 58,000 nurses statewide, say the trend gives them hope about making progress fighting hospital understaffing — which multiple studies show can lead to worse outcomes, including higher mortality rates. According to one University of Pennsylvania study, every additional patient a nurse is assigned increases the odds of a patient dying within 30 days of admission by 7%.
“This is a new tool that we can use to put pressure on the…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply