Ellis Hospital nurse, Fred Durocher, RN, said, “Instead of working with us to prioritize safe patient care, management has fought us every step of the way, intimidating and disrespecting us while pouring millions of dollars into temporary nurse contracts instead of investing in nurses that belong to our community. We are ready to strike if we need to. The ball is now in management’s court to offer us a fair contract.” 

NYSNA President Nancy Hagans, RN, BSN, CCRN, said, “Ellis Hospital and Bellevue Woman’s Center nurses have the support of our entire 42,000-member-strong union behind them. Nurses never take the decision to strike lightly, but if Ellis management forces our colleagues to take to the streets to protect patient care, we will be there with them every step of the way.”  

The unfair labor practice strike vote came on the heels of a huge victory for Ellis nurses who have been sounding the alarm about unsafe staffing levels. On Tuesday, May 21, a neutral, third-party arbitrator found that Ellis has consistently and pervasively failed to follow the safe staffing standards stipulated in the NYSNA contract. The arbitrator ordered Ellis to compensate nurses working in units affected by understaffing whose workloads significantly increased because of the hospital’s violation of the NYSNA contract. Impacted nurses include those who provide care for ICU patients, step-down patients, medical-surgical patients, emergency room patients, and psychiatric patients.    

This is the first time an arbitrator has awarded financial restitution for hospital understaffing to NYSNA nurses in an upstate New York hospital.  

Eleven nurses, representing seven different patient care units, testified in detail during five intensive days of hearings regarding their daily short staffing and struggles to provide safe patient care.  

Ellis continues to spend big on temporary nurse staffing to fill the staffing gaps caused by management’s failure to recruit and retain staff nurses.  Ellis still has a 20 percent vacancy rate and, according to 990 financial findings, spent a whopping $8.5 million on just one staffing agency in 2022. NYSNA estimates that the vast majority of that money went to hiring temporary agency nurses, who are currently paid around $64 per hour. The average starting pay for staff nurses at Ellis is $36 per hour.  

Ellis Medicine nurses are concerned that the cuts made since the merger agreement with St. Peter’s Health Partners will further exacerbate the chronic understaffing. NYSNAresearchers analyzed staffing data across six units of the hospital from February to November 2023. They found that overall, day and night shifts on these units were understaffed over 90 percent of the time.   

Since the merger agreement, Ellis has reduced essential healthcare services like overnight emergency services in Clifton Park and inpatient adolescent mental health care at Ellis Hospital. Nurses are concerned by St. Peter’s track record on healthcare service closures. Recently, St. Peter’s tried to permanently close the Burdett Birthing Center of Samaritan Hospital in Troy.    

Meanwhile, according to 990 financial filings, Ellis Medicine CEO Paul Milton’s total compensation leaped from $679,072 to $765,742 in 2020 – the worst year of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a 12.7 percent increase. In 2021, he made a whopping $794,474 in total compensation. Three other Ellis Medicine executives made approximately half a million dollars that year.