The nurses of Berkshire County’s largest hospital voted this week to approve a new contract for the next four years. Around 700 registered nurses at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association will see at least 15% across-the-board raises over that time. The contract also includes new language protecting them from inappropriate floating between departments, and more. In a statement to WAMC, BMC says it’s happy to ratify the contract and that its nurses’ “skill and compassion are integral to our work to serve everyone in Berkshire County with comprehensive care.”
Although nurses have decried staffing shortages during the pandemic, overall the process has been a little smoother than last time — which included a strike and lockout in 2017 before a deal was reached a year later.
WAMC spoke with BMC nurse and union rep Sarah Friedman about the new contract.
FRIEDMAN: I think the main thing that – and you'll probably hear this from anybody that you talk to – the main thing for us really was focusing on a way to retain staff, get new staff. Everywhere, you know, is kind of suffering from this staffing crisis, and nurses are right at the center of that. And one of the main things that we wanted to focus on for this negotiation round was the financials, really, just to kind of encourage new nurses or new nurses to the area to apply to Berkshire Medical Center, but also to encourage retention of staff. We've had a lot of staff leave in the past couple years, and I know so many hospitals, kind of all over the country have had the same thing. People are going traveling because they make more money. So, we're really trying to increase our financials to make it more desirable to stay at a local community hospital.
WAMC: The contract also talks about protecting nurses from inappropriate floating. For those not familiar with that jargon, what exactly is that? And how will the new contract address it?
So, I can talk specifically to that. I work on the family birthplace at Berkshire Medical Center right now, but I do often get floated to kind of like any medical floor, because I have a medical background aside from labor and delivery. And basically, it happens all over the hospital that nurses get floated from their primary floor where they have a commitment to a floor where they either used to work, or that is somewhat similar to their floor. In my case, I get quoted from labor and delivery and I often have to go to like a cardiac floor or a neurological floor. And a lot of nurses feel kind of overwhelmed by that. They have a lot of anxiety, because they’ve got patients that they're used to taking care of. So that's really something that we've been trying to limit. We did introduce floating language into this contract, which our contract has never seen before. So hopefully, with this, it'll change. We set some strict rules that new nurses can't be floated for 12 shifts after their orientation so that they can get kind of settled into their floor and into their role. Also, that will mean that nurses transitioning from somewhere like a medical floor to a specialty like ICU or family birthplace can't get pulled during their orientation, which has been a big problem over the past couple of years with the staffing shortages. And we also just set up a strict guideline for who floats and the order that people will float in so that it is fair when the floating does have to happen.
Now, we've talked about wage increases, we've talked about protecting nurses from the aforementioned inappropriate floating- From your vantage point, what are the other key details that folks should understand that are contained in this new contract?
A lot of the things that, in the new contracts that we talked about, is, like we've been talking about, just safe staffing. We're really trying to, like come up with ways to enforce the safe staffing, enforce the non-floating where it's inappropriate. And really a lot of the other stuff that we've covered in the contract is smaller stuff that needs to be included, but it's sort of like, we made sure that people are getting recognized for certifications that they have, stuff like that. We really are trying to kind of foster a mutual respect between management and the employees and specifically the nurses of Berkshire Medical Center to try to continue to work to make the nursing practices and just patient care safer every single day. That's really our biggest concern and we feel like this contract is really going to do that.
