More than 15,000 nurses at hospitals in the Twin Cities and 2,600 nurses at hospitals in Duluth have been negotiating a new contract that has yet to come to fruition, and the deadlock is resulting in an “informational picket” outside 13 hospitals in Minnesota on Wednesday.
Contracts for Twin Cities nurses expired last week and those for nurses in Duluth are set to expire on June 30. The Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) has announced that workers will participate in a picket amid concerns that hospitals are operating at unsafe staffing levels that compromise patient care and push many nurses to leave the profession.
“Nurses are doing everything they can to keep patients safe, but we are being stretched beyond our limits,” Chris Rubesch, a nurse and president of the MNA, said in May. “Patients are facing longer waits, and overworked staff are facing dangerous conditions.”
Additionally, nurses fear for their physical safety at current staffing levels. Healthcare workers are five times more likely to be injured by an assault on the job than the average American worker, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That report also shows that healthcare workers saw a steady rise in the rate of nonfatal workplace violence from 2011 to 2018…