Nurses voted overwhelmingly to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice strike at Antelope Valley Hospital (AVH) to protest unfair labor practices and chronic short staffing announced the California Nurses Association.

"With this strike authorization vote, we are sending a clear message to the AVH Board that we hold them accountable for the eroding conditions at the hospital," said Kathleen Stalter, RN. “We call on the board to demand that the executive management team address the hospital's chronic short-staffing, stop wasting patient care dollars and invest instead in the retention and recruitment of nursing staff to provide quality care to this community."

The Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) General Counsel issued a Complaint earlier this month against the Antelope Valley Healthcare District finding merit with a number of unfair labor practice charges brought by the California Nurses Association on behalf of the RNs. The AVHD is charged with interfering with RNs' legal rights as employees and union members, refusing to furnish requested information to their union representatives and illegally preventing approximately 500 nurses from returning to work in retaliation for their legal one-day strike in September, resulting in a four-day lockout. 

CNA represents the approximately 1,000 RNs at AVH, who struck for one day in September, to draw attention to chronic short staffing across all the hospital’s units. More than 60 nurses have left the hospital this year and there are nearly 100 vacant RN positions.

The Complaint issued by the PERB, is indicative of the current management's propensity to squander patient care dollars rather than investing it in patient care, nurses said. The executive management team spent nearly $4 million on replacement nurses for the one-day strike and four-day lockout, sending district funds away from the hospital and out of the local economy. The Complaint issued against the hospital district seeks full back pay for four days for hundreds of registered nurses who were illegally prevented from returning to work after the one-day strike called to focus community attention on the critical issues that led to the impasse in contract negotiations.

"So far this year, the hospital has paid $5.4 million for the handful of executives making up the Alecto management team and additional funds on lawyers to represent them against the unfair labor practice charges," said Dawn Harriman, RN.

"In the past six months 16 full-time intensive care unit nurses have left AVH. That's enough nurses to staff an entire shift in our busy unit, said Diana Perry, RN. "Those of us who continue working in the ICU are fighting for our patients every day. When will AVH step up to support the nurses who care for some of the sickest and most critically injured people in the Antelope Valley?"

“The Board hired Alecto to improve patient care and to improve the hospital's finances. The opposite is happening," said Maria Altamirano, RN. "The pattern now is that many of the nurses that AVH hires are recent nursing school grads - they stay long enough to get trained and then leave for positions at private hospitals with better conditions. Essentially, patient care dollars are being used to subsidize the training of nurses for the private healthcare industry. We are asking the board to stop this hemorrhage by investing in the nursing staff; by supporting conditions that will encourage new nurses to spend their careers at AVH. Safe quality patient care depends on our ability to retain experienced RNs."

The California Nurses Association represents nearly 100,000 registered nurses statewide.