NY Nurse December 2016/January 2017

A hospital can be a very dangerous place to work.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nurses in acute and long-term care facilities experience rates of non-fatal workplace assault double that of workers in other healthcare settings and ten times that of workers in the private sector overall. Moreover, the DOL suggests that healthcare workplace violence is vastly underreported. The government formally collects only incidents that lead to time away from work. Surveys show that many incidents go unreported, even at facilities with formal incident reporting systems.

Each year, New York’s Workforce Development Institute (WDI) issues a “Working Women Calendar” that celebrates twelve extraordinary women and the contributions they make to the workplace. NYSNA’s Central Regional Director Ethel Mathis, RN, is featured in the 2017 edition.

This hospital is our second home and we are family! Our bond and perseverance allowed us to fight strong and ultimately achieve a great contract! We look forward to recruiting nurses and welcoming them into our ‘home’ and continuing to make Westchester Medical Center a great place to be not only for us but most importantly for the patients and families.” These are the words of Damayanthy Sujanthan, RN, a neo-natal ICU nurse and one of 1,500 NYSNA members who celebrated a contract ratification on January 4.

NYSNA nurses at St. John’s Riverside Hospital (SJRH) in Yonkers were celebrating as 2016 came to a close. On December 22, they ratified an outstanding new five-year agreement that delivers both strong economic gains and patient care improvements.

When NYSNA, 1199SEIU, elected officials, and community and faith groups joined ranks in 2014, they formed a determined coalition on a mission to save Brooklyn’s Interfaith Hospital. After doing just that, the group did not disband. Instead, when the fight was over and the smoke had cleared, what emerged was a fully empowered organization: Community Care Brooklyn (CCB).

With the overwhelming ratification of a contract covering 1,500 NYSNA members at Westchester Medical Center (WMC) on January 4, our union continues its winning streak. It is an outstanding record of achievement. Add to the WMC win this year: contracts at Long Island’s Catholic Health System (St. Joseph, St. Charles and St. Catherine of Siena hospitals); St. John’s Riverside in Yonkers; at Nathan Littauer Hospital in Gloversville; St. Elizabeth in Utica and Samaritan in Watertown, in the North Country: Elizabethtown, Moses Luddington, and Alice Hyde Medical Center.

Retrospective

At the end of each year, people often try to count our blessings and offer thanks for the good things that have happened and to hope that the future will bring us closer to our goals. But for some reason, nurses tend to have this nagging feeling that somehow we didn’t do enough: we didn’t do as well in school as we should have; we didn’t spend enough time with our families; we lost a favorite patient or friend; we didn’t nurture our relationships; as hard as we work, our jobs are a disappointment, unsatisfying.