Leaders Listen, Respond to Nurses’ Woes

By Thrall, Terese Hudson

NURSES Are you really listening to your nurses? In March 2007, executives at Mount Sinai Hospital, a 350-bed acute care facility in a poor neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, found out the hard way that they were not. That’s when the National Nurses Organizing Committee launched a campaign to get the hospital’s nurses to join the California Nurses Association.

“In our view, it came out of nowhere,” says Mount Sinai Health System President and CEO Alan Charming. “We were embarrassed that there were issues that management didn’t know about and wasn’t addressing.”

Mount Sinai leaders took an unusual step: Board chair Abraham Morgan and Charming met with nurses in 20 voluntary forums during the three-month union campaign. Trustees also went on patient rounds with nurses.

“We wanted our nurses to know how much we appreciate them,” Channing says. He points out that Mount Sinai’s RNs choose to care for the poor-60 percent of the hospital’s patients are on Medicaid, and 12 percent are self-pay-and that the hospital often runs at a deficit. “Our nurses could go elsewhere and make more money, have better benefits,” Channing says. “Many of them see their work as a mission.”

Morgan, who grew up in the neighborhood, says listening and acting yield powerful results. “We can’t solve all the problems, but we can take action to improve conditions,” he says. For instance, many of the hospital’s nurses were concerned about a lack of support staff, such as unit secretaries and nurses’ aides, and frustrated by unavailable supplies.

“They were telling us, ‘You have to help us do our jobs,’” says trustee Ellen Havdala, one of four board members who accompanied nurses on patients rounds. “They appreciated that we listened, and it showed in the ultimate vote.”

The nurses rejected the union last summer, 293 to 152.

Union officials viewed the forums, which nurses could attend during the workday, less favorably. “The nurses were a captive audience for hospital management, and the meeting didn’t allow for a free debate between union and nonunion sides,” says Fernando Losada, the organizing committee’s director of collective bargaining for Illinois. “They were coerced.”

Channing notes that communications were vetted with attorneys to make sure they followed National Labor Relations Board rules.

Since the campaign, Mount Sinai has stepped up recruiting efforts for support staff and reorganized the materials management department to improve supply delivery.

To encourage ongoing communication, the hospital set up a toll- free telephone number that staff can call anonymously to ask a question, which is then answered in a biweekly staff newsletter.

Channing’s advice to other hospital executives: Be sensitive to the signs that employees are unhappy and that issues are going unresolved. It might be as subtle as nurses not wanting to make eye contact when the CEO walks down the hall. “If hospitals can learn to spot the weak signals, the more likely it is they’ll know if a union is knocking on the door,” he explains.

The union says it’s not going away. “We don’t view this vote as a mandate that the nurses don’t want union representation,” Losada says. “The vote was a disappointment, but we won’t walk away from Mount Sinai nurses; we’ll continue to talk to them about their issues.”

TERESE HUDSON THRALL is a senior writer for Hospitals & Health Networks. This article originally appeared in its November 2007 issue.

Copyright Health Forum Inc. Mar 2008

(c) 2008 Trustee. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.