A new era for Nurses United

The members of the AFT-affiliated Nurses United for Improved Patient Care in Kansas City, Mo., will tell anyone who asks that the reason they wanted a union was to make hospital stays better for their patients. Now, after years of negotiations, the nurses finally have one of the tools they need to achieve their goal: a first contract.

Nearly 600 nurses from Lee’s Summit Hospital, Medical Center of Independence (MCI) and Menorah Medical Center voted overwhelmingly in September to accept a 2.5 year contract. The successful conclusion of negotiations is a major step toward something rare: organizing an entire hospital system. Twelve hospitals are part of HCA Midwest, which bought the system from Health Midwest in April.

“This will set the stage for more nurses to organize,” says Mary Nash, a 17-year veteran ICU nurse at MCI.

The ratification vote ended well over three years of contract negotiations that began in April 2000, when registered nurses at Lee’s Summit voted to join Nurses United.

“We never let ourselves think of not getting a settlement,” says LuAnn Riddle, a 16-year veteran who works in the post-anesthesia care unit at Lee’s Summit. A member of the negotiating team, Riddle has been with Nurses United from the beginning. “[Negotiating] was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But it is the one thing that has given me the most hope that we can make a real difference in patient care.”

Each of the major issues in the negotiations—staffing, mandatory overtime and floating—was addressed in the contract. One of the most important provisions, according to Nurses United, is an agreement to establish nurse practice committees at each of the three hospitals to deal with staffing, patient care and nurses’ concerns on other issues.

The contracts also restrict the potentially dangerous practice of floating, in which nurses are assigned to units outside their normal scope of practice. The contracts also state that mandatory overtime can only be used in an unanticipated circumstance and not to “fill a hole” in a unit.

In addition, the nurses negotiated salary increases of 7 percent to 12 percent over the span of the contract.

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