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Baystate Franklin Hospital Nurses Ratify New Contract

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MNA
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Nurses at a western Massachusetts hospital have ratified a new contract ending a lengthy dispute with management.

   The Massachusetts Nurses Association said the vote by nearly 200 nurses at Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield was unanimous to approve the new five year contract.  Nurse Donna Stern, co-chair of the bargaining unit, said nurses are relieved the, at times acrimonious, 29 month standoff with the hospital is over.

   " I do think it is going to take a little bit of time. This has been a long long negotiating process and it has affected everyone at the hospital, not just nurses."

      A key provision of the contract is the creation of a task force to look at hospital staffing and the use of overtime.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.