VIRTUA STRIKE DELAYED, SLOW PROGRESS
Healthcare Secrets Hiding In Plain Sight: Staffing Cuts At Hospitals
Readers may recall that The Mount Holly Reporter reached out to Virtua management and press office about the contract negotiations but received no reply. This is similar to the behavior Virtua modeled during the hospital expansion meetings.
However, the Health Professionals and Allied Employees [HPAE] nurses union reached out to reveal that Virtua has only recently begun providing offers, and while those offers are not close enough for a settlement, the progress was enough to put off the strike which was recently authorized.
The strike is now pushed off until June 23rd unless negotiation progress justifies pushing it back again.
HPEA gave its bargaining position to Virtua on day 1 of negotiations back in March.
Virtua has been well aware of that position and the contracts HPAE settled with competing hospitals like Cooper. See below for a sense of what other hospitals have been willing to accept in terms of staffing.
Editorial Content: Healthcare Secret Hides In Plain Sight
Its no secret that management at many hospitals looks for savings on labor. But did you know that a prime way of saving on labor costs at hospitals is by adjusting staffing ratios to a shifting patient census?
Each hospital will do it differently and The Reporter is not suggested how Virtua handles its staffing because they do not share much in the way of information. But nurses have sounded off on that very subject which you can read in a previous article here.
Based upon research done by The Reporter, its clear that some hospitals emulate a restaurant business model where staffing is cut in real time as a reaction to slow business. Below is a rather extreme example which I found at a web site called “all nurses.com.” I confirmed with a nurse friend who experienced a version of this type of practice at a hospital where she worked.
This is offered to reveal that the practice is apparently common at some hospitals to one extent or another. We shall see if Virtua nurses can get contract language that protects them from an “ad-hoc census” staffing model.
