Praise Significant Patient Care Improvements

University of Chicago Medical Center registered nurses Tuesday night voted by a strong majority to approve a new four-year agreement with the hospital that they say will strengthen patient care protections at the hospital.

“University of Chicago nurses stood together to end the unsafe practice of rotating shifts, to keep staffing advocacy in the hands of bedside clinical nurses and to improve staffing conditions for our patients and the community,” said Burn Unit RN Talisa Hardin.

National Nurses United, the nation’s largest organization of RNs, represents 1,550 RNs at UCMC.

At the heart of the agreement are a number of improvements that were central to the nurses’ concerns.

One key issue was “rotating shifts” that had required RNs to rotate back and forth between night and day shifts, a scheduling pattern that left many RNs fatigued and less mentally alert, increasing the risk of medication and other errors that is a risk to patient safety. In several cases, nurses had fallen asleep while driving home from shifts.

Under the new pact, all RNs will have a regular permanent shift with no rotating.

A second significant gain is the addition of eight new “patient care support nurses” to assist when nursing units are overwhelmed and need extra clinical help or are facing emergencies.

Further, the UCMC RNs maintained the traditional clinical role of “charge” nurses. Charge nurses make sure there are a safe number of nurses for patient care on their unit, respond to emergencies like cardiac arrests, and serve as a clinical resource for less experienced RNs and physicians.

UCMC wanted to replace charge nurses with administrative managers whose decisions are likely to be based on budget goals, not patient need.

“We were able to maintain charge nurses in the union, in their clinical role and reduce the number of patients that charge nurses are required to take in addition to their charge nurse duties,” said lead negotiator Jan Rodolfo, RN, NNU’s Midwest director.

The agreement also provides an across the board pay increase of 9.5 percent for all UCMC RNs over the four years of the pact, with additional increases based on years of experience.