Nurses from Yakima Regional Medical and Cardiac Center rallied Monday evening to engage with the community prior to heading back into contract negotiations this week.
Several dozen people turned out for the free barbecue at Milroy Park, where a large blue banner read “Patients Before Profits,” and a speaker from Washington State Nurses Association drew cheers from the crowd of nurses and community members.
Together, they can “keep the hope that this hospital will have a new owner that will bring the community hospital back to the community,” director of labor Christine Himmelsbach said.
A statement from Regional did not comment on the frustrations voiced by nurses.
“Yakima Regional Medical & Cardiac Center is continuing negotiations with the Washington State Nurses Association under the auspices of a federal mediator,” administrative director of operations Darrin Cook wrote in an email. “We look forward to reaching a mutually acceptable agreement.”
For their ongoing contract negotiations, nurses say they are most concerned about recruiting and retaining more staff to work at Regional and about ensuring nurses get a say in proper staffing levels, which ultimately can affect patient safety.
But whether Regional’s owner will take any notice of those concerns remains to be seen.
Regional was bought by Florida-based for-profit Health Management Associates in 2003, which was then bought out by Tennessee-based for-profit Community Health Systems in 2014.
This spring, news broke that CHS is looking to sell Regional and Toppenish Community Hospital, which prompted a lawsuit from the Yakima Valley Community Foundation. Under a contract formed when HMA first came to Yakima, the foundation has some say in how the two hospitals can be sold.
On Monday night, speaker after speaker at the Milroy Park rally decried the way for-profit companies have taken over a community hospital.
Jan Bussert, now president of the state Nurses Association, said she began her career at St. Elizabeth’s, which became Regional.
The hospital and the work environment she enjoyed all those years ago are gone, she said, and the reason is simply “profit.”
“We miss our home,” she said. “We want it back.”
City councilmember Dulce Gutierrez also spoke at the rally, voicing her support for the nurses union and advocating a strong stance against “corporate, for-profit companies that are coming into our communities and buying out our health centers.”
Regional’s contract with its nurses expired at the end of March, but negotiations were complicated by CHS’s announced intent to sell the hospitals.
Renewed contract talks are scheduled for today and Wednesday and will be conducted with a mediator from the national Labor Relations Board, a component the nurses and CHS agreed to, according to WSNA communications director Ruth Schubert.
Nurses are the ones who will see the hospital through its upcoming change in ownership, Schubert said. Regional’s wages are below the market average, she said, which affects employees’ willingness to commit to the hospital.
“The nurses have really seen that ownership by a for-profit corporation has not been good for the hospital, and they want to see that turned around,” she said.
Nurse Herbie Aganda, who works in the cardiovascular thoracic unit, has been at Regional for 11 years and saw the transition from HMA to CHS.
“When CHS bought HMA, things just really went downhill after that,” he said.
Many nurses have left, he said, and those who remain are so overworked that they have no spare energy to help each other, so morale has plummeted.
CHS has a “stranglehold” on Regional, Aganda said.
He’d like to see the hospital bought by a company or a nonprofit willing to invest in the community and to listen to its own staff.
