Nurses at two Ascension Via Christi hospitals in Wichita worked their first day with a union contract Tuesday.
They say it only happened after the recent threat of a third strike was slid under the doors of managers who wouldn’t meet with them face to face.
“I believe that Ascension really drug their feet and I think their goal in that was to discourage us nurses and it did not. It just made us stronger, made us push harder and they realized at one point that we were not letting up,” said Marvin Ruckle, a registered nurse in the St. Joseph neonatal intensive care unit and member of the bargaining team.
In an emailed statement, an Ascension spokesperson said: “These contracts respect the needs of our registered nurses and create a solid foundation for a collaborative and respectful working relationship.We thank our nurses for voting to accept these fair and equitable contracts and are eager to move forward together as we continue to fulfill our Mission of caring for all and improving the health of the communities we are privileged to serve.”
St. Joseph nurses voted in March 2023, a few months after St. Francis voted, in favor of joining the National Nurses Organizing Commission, an affiliate of the National Nurses United.
Nurses said they wanted to improve working conditions for them and safety for their patients.
The two hospitals have roughly 1,000 nurses.
Among the union member nurses, 96% percent at St. Francis and all of them at St. Joseph voted Sunday and Monday to ratify the contract, which started Tuesday and runs through April 2026.
The vote followed meetings last Tuesday and Wednesday between the bargaining teams at both hospitals and administrators, who had not met with nurses from both hospitals at the same time up until that point, Ruckle said.
“That was a huge, huge turn of events for us,” he said.
Those negotiations happened after nurses threatened a third strike a few weeks before that, nurses said.
A National Nurses United spokesperson said the contract would be available to the public once it had been through a “fine-toothed combing and getting it to a printer to make copies for all the nurses,” which could take up to a couple months.
But here are the highlights that nurses said are in the contract:
Increased pay: Every nurse will see a pay increase and the average will be just over 14% over two years; some nurses will receive over 50%. Lisa Watson, a registered nurse in the medical ICUintensive care unit at St. Francis and member of the bargaining team, said this will help with retaining and attracting new nurses. Kansas has more than 20,000 active licenses than the number of nurses practicing in Kansas , according to the most-recently available statistics.
“We have raised the bar through all the hospitals throughout Wichita and our surrounding areas,” said Shelly Rader, a registered nurse at St. Francis’ emergency room who is on the bargaining team. “So we believe with us raising the bar, this is going to incentive the nurses to come to the hospital, to want to work, because they will be under the understand that with this contract, they will be able to have a voice.”
Accountability to nurses: The establishment of two committees that will get reports from Ascension, showing things like nursing staffing levels and whether cameras in the parking lot are working.
“Now they have to provide that to us,” Watson said. “We’re going to see that big picture and they are going to have to provide us stuff they never provided us before, which is great because we can hold them accountable now.”
Staffing ratios: There will also now be specific ratios of patients to nurses in units throughout the hospitals. Those ratios, nurses said, were standards Ascension reported but didn’t adhere to.
Those ratios include: 2-to-1 patients to nurses in the ICU, 5-to-1 in medical surgical unit and 4-to-1 in the emergency room.
Rader said the ratio at St. Francis emergency room was close to 11-to-1 on Monday night.
The higher levels, nurses say, are dangerous for them and for patients.
Restrictions on floating nurses: Nurses said before the contract, Ascension would rotate nurses specialized in one unit to ones they had no experience in. That practice is restricted in the new contract. Nurses can be floated to another unit that is comparable to the one they are usually assigned. Nurses said the old practice was dangerous for themselves and patients.
Nurses said there are still things they want to see changed, but the contract is a step in the right direction.
“This is what the nurses wanted ... we went to the bargaining table with every single nurse, every single department in mind,” Watson said. “We know that it’s not perfect, and we know there’s a lot of places for improvements, but this is the first contract and we can only move up from here.”
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