Newborn babies have started to be transferred to other hospitals and expectant mothers are being told to go to other medical centers as thousands of nurses at four NYC hospitals are preparing to launch a work strike on Monday.
At Mt. Sinai, ambulances are already being turned away, patients are being discharged as quickly as possible, elective surgeries are being canceled – and NICU babies being moved elsewhere – due to the impending strike.
Mt. Sinai in Manhattan, Mt. Sinai Morningside, Mt. Sinai West, and Montefiore Medical Center are currently locked in a standoff with the New York State Nurses Association, with the latter demanding changes – particularly the hiring of more nurses – to avoid a strike.
“It’s gonna be chaos. There’s no way they could have enough nurses to take care of the patients,” BronxCare nurse Flandersia Jones told CBS2.
Nurses at BronxCare had also been threatening a strike, but the hospital said it reached a deal with the nurse union on Saturday.
If an agreement cannot be reached between the four holdout hospitals and the union, the strike will begin on Monday at 6 am, putting the lives of an untold number of patients – and possibly dozens or hundreds of newborns – at risk.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
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If anyone is curious, nurses have been overworked and understaffed since COVID when most over 55 nurses retired and hospitals struggled to fill those spaces, but refused to raise their wages. Hospital profits have been down, so a few months ago they announced massive cuts to nurse benefits (while their CEOs and board are making seven figure salaries). So the nurses announced a strike with the demand that the hospitals figure out a way to get more staff hired without cutting into the needs of the current staff.
These were the supposed heroes of Covid. Now they’re showing their true colors. Those of us who knew people that were lucky enough to get out of the hospital during covid knew already then that a large portion of them are not heroes at all.
@Yserbius123, Thanks for that info. Was not aware.