Hospital trade group raps St. Vincent strikers' staffing claim
WORCESTER - The Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association, an industry trade group representing more than 100 hospitals and health care organizations in the state and whose board includes St. Vincent Hospital CEO Carolyn Jackson, said the claim that nurse staffing at St. Vincent Hospital lags that of other hospitals in Massachusetts “simply isn’t true.”
“The nurses’ union has been claiming that nurse staffing at St. Vincent Hospital lags that of other hospitals in Massachusetts. That simply isn’t true,” the MHA said in a press release on Wednesday, citing an analysis of data from St. Vincent. “Greater Worcester residents should be proud of the care provided at St. Vincent Hospital and its proven track record of safe and reliable nurse staffing.”
But the Massachusetts Nurses Association, the union representing the nurses at St. Vincent, said the data analyzed by the MHA is “meaningless.”
“This is an apples-to-oranges comparison between us and Tenet/MHA, and the public needs to know that the nurses are striking over a staffing approach that is real and actually ensures patient safety,” MNA spokesman David Schildmeier said. “The data they are reporting is self-reported by the individual hospitals to the MHA, which is akin to having the nuclear power industry report their own safety data to themselves, and then tell the public look how safe their power plants are. The risk of that process is a meltdown, which is actually what has happened at St. Vincent as evidenced by 800 nurses striking, saying your standards are failing our patients.”
At issue is a measure called worked hours per patient day.
The MHA called this a “key industry indicator” and defined it as the number of hours of direct nursing care a patient receives in a 24-hour period.
The trade group said that it analyzed “detailed data going back to 2019” and found:
• All of St. Vincent’s medical/surgical units have nursing WHPPD levels that are at or above the median of other comparable Massachusetts hospitals.
• The majority of medical/surgical units are in the top quarter, nurse staffing better than 75% of comparable Massachusetts hospitals.
• On average, the seven medical/surgical units at the hospital provide more direct nursing care per patient day than 74% of comparable Massachusetts hospitals.
But Schildmeier said that the data “does not comport with the actual staffing documented by the nurses at St. Vincent Hospital nearly every day and every shift.”
“(That) is that the standard of care on all the medical surgical floors is one nurse to five patients (regardless of what the current contract or their reports to the MHHA show), which is dangerous, and puts patients subject to that standard at increased risk for serious injury every day on every shift, as documented in hundreds of real time reports by nurses,” Schildmeier said.
Tenet has stated publicly that this is the standard they want to maintain, which is why the nurses are on strike.”
The MHA did not respond to follow-up questions by deadline on Wednesday.
Schildmeier also cited the Telegram & Gazette’s previous reporting in saying that St. Vincent nurses want the same standard of care as those at UMass Memorial Medical Center, where nurses report a 4-to-1 patient ratio, a resource nurse, a float pool, patient care observers and secretaries.
“The nurses at St. Vincent are striking because they want all patients in Worcester to have the same standard of care,” he said. “(The MHA) is an industry group by and for hospital administrators, and has only one purpose – to protect the profit margins of its members, and to support their members' efforts to do so by opposing any safe standard of nursing care.”
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