Keck, nurses reach contract agreement
Following 10 months of contract negotiations and a two-day strike July 13-14, nurses at Keck Hospital of USC and USC Norris Cancer Hospital agreed to a new four-year contract with Keck Medicine of USC Wednesday. The contract will increase nurse wages, guarantee sick days off and increase the amount of time nurses have between shifts.
Under the agreement’s terms, Keck will hire 70 new registered nurses by the end of the year. Nurses previously said understaffing through over reliance on contract nurses — who work at hospitals for short periods of time — hurt the quality of hospital care and strained nurses.
Other changes include an increase in the mandated break time between shifts — from eight hours to nine — a 27.7% pay increase throughout nurses’ contracts and a guaranteed amount of personal protective equipment.
“Our registered nurses are an invaluable part of our organization,” said Marty Sargeant, interim CEO and chief operating officer of Keck and Norris Hospitals, in a statement to the Daily Trojan. “We are excited to move forward with a contract that reflects our commitment to our caregivers and supports our mission to provide exceptional patient care.”
Kerri Dodgens, a nurse in the Keck ICU float pool and member of the bargaining team and Professional Practice Committee — a union committee that addresses nursing practice concerns throughout the hospital — said she feels relieved that a contract was finally agreed upon.
“I am really proud of my fellow nurses for standing strong and united together and not folding to the tactics that the hospital tried to employ at various points of just sort of scaring us away from what our goal was,” Dodgens said. “So I’m really proud of our nurses for what they want for their profession and what they want for their hospital.”
Michael Simonton, a nurse who works in the ICU at Keck, said that, after months of “very contentious” negotiations and nurses feeling the Hospital did not take nurse or patient safety seriously, he is hopeful the new contract is “a start of a rebuilding of our relationship with the hospital.”
“When the hospital has committed to stop using [contract nurses] … it’s really a strong move and it shows that the hospital’s beginning to support patient safety the way that the nurses want them to,” Simonton said.
The contract also includes bonuses for nurses, a guarantee that their retirement benefits will return Jan. 1, and the right to strike if changes are made in the retirement benefits’ language.
Similar instances of nurses organizing strikes have occurred across the country. In Buffalo, N.Y., the Catholic Health System is preparing to employ replacement workers after nurses authorized a strike that will start Oct. 1. In Worcester, Mass., nurses at St. Vincent Hospital have been on strike since March 8. Registered nurses at Kaiser Permanente are also weighing a strike, citing understaffing concerns.
Throughout negotiations, nurses expressed concerns that working conditions would deter nurses from joining Keck. In interviews with the Daily Trojan after the strike in July, nurses, including Dodgens and Simonton, said that the quality of the Hospital’s care declined and felt pressured by the Hospital to work 18 hour shifts while caring for “some of the sickest patients in the nation.” They said that although Keck was publicly calling nurses heroes but treating them poorly in private.
“It really just comes down to patient safety, and we want our nurses well rested so they provide the safest care possible,” Dodgens said. “We want them not overworked, not working 18 hour shifts constantly, feeling like they have to work an inordinate amount of overtime shifts just to keep the hospital up and running.”
After the strike and continued action by the nurses, the nurse’s bargaining team met with Keck on Aug. 31 to resume negotiations. On Aug. 27, the nurses voted that they were willing to strike in support of the bargaining team’s demands.
The new contract, Dodgens said, is a step in the right direction.
“We’re an industry-leading hospital,” Dodgens said. “We need nurses that can provide that type of care. We need a contract that is going to help attract those kinds of nurses, and I feel like now we have that.”
Ignacio Ventura-Maqueda Jr. and Kelly Sadikun contributed to this report.