Nurses at Six Florida Hospitals Join National Union
Thursday, December 16, 2010
By: Euna Lhee, HealthyState.org

December 16, 2010 | WMFE - Over the past month, nurses at six Florida hospitals, including two in Central Florida, voted to join a national union. They're part of a growing number of nurses across the country who are unionizing.

Nurses at the Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford attend their first union meeting.

It’s a time of celebration for the nurses at Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford. It’s a cold December night and the first union meeting after the vote.

Pamela Young came to the gathering before her 12-hour shift at the hospital. She’s been a nurse for 20 years.

“We all love our jobs,” Young said. “We love taking care of patients.”

But sometimes she says she doesn’t get to take care of them as well as she would like. She works on the cardiac floor and sees 5 to 6 patients a day. To her, that’s too many.

“A lot of times, things are missed because you’re rushed, and there are things that you sometimes don’t catch or don’t see,” Young said.

Young would like to see only four to five patients a day. She hopes the union will help with that. She and 300 of her colleagues have just joined the National Nurses Organizing Committee of Florida. It’s an affiliate of National Nurses United, which calls itself the country’s biggest professional association of registered nurses.

Young says joining a union is a way to make the hospital listen.

"I understand that this is a business. This is a corporation,” Young said. “But your business first should be to make people safe, to take care of patients. That’s why they’re here.”

Several studies have tried to determine the safest workload for nurses. One by the Journal of the American Medical Association found every additional patient added to a nurse’s roster increases the risk of death for all of his or her patients by 7 percent.

Central Florida Regional Hospital declined requests for an interview for this story.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said : “While we do not believe having a union is in the best interest of our hospital, we respect our employees’ rights to make this decision.”

The facility’s parent organization, the Hospital Corporation of America, did not return phone calls.

University of Central Florida health economist Lynn Unruh said most hospitals don’t like it when their nurses unionize.

“They don’t want to have to pay higher wages, because that cuts into their whole financial situation,” Unruh said. “And actually, hospitals are very financially strapped right now.”

From the health care consumer’s perspective, Unruh says there are advantages and disadvantages.

“One could conclude that a union… unionized hospital would be a safer hospital to be a patient in,” Unruh said. “The bad side is that it could end up costing a little more to be in the hospital.”

She said it’s been harder for nurses to join and keep a union here, since Florida is a right to work state. That means not everyone in a union shop is required to join the union, but most benefits still extend to all employees.

Unruh said the new wave of nurse unions is a trend not only in Florida, but also across the country.

Malinda Markowitz agreed. She’s the President of the National Nurses Organizing Committee. In the past year, 16 hospitals have joined the group. Other recent union victories have been in Texas, Missouri and Kansas.

“Really, what it’s about is nurses uniting across the United States for improved patient care and to improve the nursing profession,” Markowitz said.

The union’s next step in Florida is to schedule membership drives and leadership elections for each hospital. It hopes to organize union votes at more hospitals around the state in January.