Unity at last month’s strike leads to fair agreement with affordable healthcare
Last week, registered nurses at Heritage Valley Beaver ratified a new contract that preserves affordable healthcare for nurses and begins to address key staffing concerns that nurses have raised.
“We’re pleased to reach an agreement that ensures registered nurses at Heritage Valley Beaver will not move backward as our health system moves forward,” said Molly Romigh, RN and chapter president. “We will continue working every day to advocate for better staffing and the highest quality of care.”
Hospital management had been insisting that nurses pay more for their health insurance – including higher premiums, higher out-of-pocket costs and unaffordable deductibles of up to $800 for individuals and $2400 for families – than they’d make in raises. The proposed healthcare cost increases, and management’s resistance to addressing staffing concerns led to a successful one-day strike on July 19th.
By staying united through their strike, and with strong support from their communities, the nurses were able to win a contract that kept healthcare affordable and ensured that every nurse would receive a real raise in take-home pay.
“Everyone deserves affordable health insurance. We’re proud that we stood together and fought against high deductibles in our health plan, because we know that our hospital is an anchor in our community and helps set the standard for pay and benefits in Beaver County,” said Jill Richner, RN and union chapter Vice President.
Nurses and management were able to come together to address staffing concerns in some key departments of the hospital. But there are still plenty of areas for improvement and nurses will continue to identify areas where staffing improvements are needed and will continue to advocate for improvements in those areas so that patients can receive the highest quality of care.
“As nurses, our primary goal is to provide the best care for our patients,” said Mary Yaria, RN and member of the negotiating committee. “The agreements we reached with our hospital management are a start and we are going to continue to be united to make sure they have the highest quality of care every day.”
Despite management’s aggressive posture to roll back many job protections and benefits, nurses stood strong through negotiations and their strike and were able to maintain and expand essential policies, including:
- Maintained 100% coverage (including for all spouses, after management proposed to exclude spouses and move to an 80/20 coverage split.)
- Maintained double time for nurses to fill holes in scheduled development.
- Maintained protections against management flexing down nurses.
- Maintain wage steps based on RN anniversary in addition to annual across the board raises.
- Set aside $100,000 for better clinical education for nurses.
- Improved ratios on the observation unit and stopped management from increasing ratios in Maternity unit and with cardiac monitor patients.