WORCESTER, Mass. — Marlena Pellegrino remembers well the day she and other St. Vincent Hospital nurses went on strike. What she didn’t know at the time was that the walk-out would make history as the longest nurse’s strike to ever take place in Massachusetts.
“We went on strike March 8, 2021,” she said. “We were on strike 301 days.”
That strike was over working conditions. Nurses at St. Vincent wanted limits on the number of patients they were responsible for on each shift. The agreement, signed in January 2022, capped patient loads at five -- with fewer patients per nurse in such critical care areas as the ICU. But Pellegrino said the hospital violates those contract terms every single day.
“There has been no labor peace at all in the entire three years since the strike ended,” she said. “That hospital, the building, the feeling is unrecognizable to any of us who have worked there for any amount of time. It’s like a black hole. There’s no staff, the supplies are limited, there is barely any management at all.”
Pellegrino has been a nurse at St. Vincent for nearly 40 years and is a member of the Massachusetts Nurses Association negotiating team.
“It’s a shell of what it once was,” she said. “It could make you cry every day.”
The MNA said what management remains at the hospital is hostile to its members -- and claimed that purposeful understaffing is putting patient outcomes in danger.
“For months, we have been asking them to fix this, to get staff in there to care for these patients appropriately and they’ve simply refused to do so,” said Mary Sue Howlett, associate director of nursing for the MNA and a nurse practitioner herself. “We have been trying to meet with management at St. Vincent for more than two years and they have refused to meet with the union.”
The MNA is fighting back. This month, it filed the sixth in a series of complaints about St. Vincent -- the latest one based on more than 500 ‘unsafe staffing reports’ filed by nurses during the last four months. That complaint went to the state Department of Public Health as well as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and CMS -- the federal agency which administers Medicaid and Medicare.
Howlett said the state DPH plans to meet with the MNA next week.
“The goal of this is really to notify management that things are unsafe,” Howlett said. “That nurses are unable to care for the patients the way they’re supposed to, want to and are licensed to do so.”
Howlett said one dramatic example of understaffing happened in the St. Vincent Emergency Department on a recent overnight shift. Normally, 14 nurses are assigned to what is, arguably, the busiest and most hectic unit in the hospital. In that particular shift, there were four.
The union also cited a surge in bedsores as proof that patients aren’t being timely repositioned because of a lack of staff -- and two deaths in the dialysis unit, possibly connected to a shortage of nurses.
Pellegrino said she sees troubling evidence every time she works that Tenet Healthcare, the for-profit owner of St. Vincent, is putting patient safety second.
“I feel morally conflicted going to work every day, feeling that I may harm someone unintentionally,” she said. “They are understaffing us by design.”
One recent night, Pellegrino said she walked into a ward of patients waiting for pain medications and waiting to be changed out of urine-soaked garments.
“Dressings not done, important medications, insulin given late,” she said. “Nebulizer treatments given late. Every medication given late. Would you want your family member treated this way?”
Tenet Healthcare tells Boston 25 News that the union is essentially engaging in a publicity stunt.
“Saint Vincent Hospital remains focused on providing high-quality as well as regionally and nationally recognized healthcare services for our community,” said Shelly Weiss Friedberg, Director of Public Relations for Tenet Healthcare. “The MNA’s accusations are disrespectful to the dedicated nurses, physicians and staff who prioritize caring for our patients.”
Friedberg said there’s ‘no doubt’ the ‘unfounded attacks’ are linked to upcoming negotiations between the union and the hospital, calling it a ‘tactic’ the union commonly employs at contract negotiation time.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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