Nurses rallied at the City-County Building in downtown Pittsburgh on Thursday morning to highlight a list of action items they say will improve their working conditions and patient care.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organized the rally, which was attended by Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and former state Rep. Sara Innamorato, who is the Democratic Party's nominee for Allegheny County executive. The event comes a day after SEIU's Pittsburgh Nurse Summit, where attendees discussed challenges they face at work, as well as potential solutions.
Chief among nurses' grievances is low pay, which they say exacerbates problems created by dangerously high nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. Myra Taylor, an intensive care nurse at Allegheny General Hospital, said these conditions hinder patients' safety as the lack of veteran bedside nurses means less experienced nurses train newer employees.
"Experienced nurses have intuition, they also have training," said Taylor. "It may take longer for a newer nurse to figure things out that would be much quicker caught by an experienced nurse."
Nurses want a minimum $40-an-hour wage that increases with experience, which they say will help retain more senior staff. At the same time, they want hospitals to limit the use of travel or agency nurses, who might be paid two or three times the hourly wage a staff nurse earns.
Joel Gundy began working for UPMC hospitals less than a year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said he's frustrated that higher nurse-to-patient ratios he saw implemented as an emergency response to the pandemic remain in place.
"For many of us, it feels like in day-to-day work, we are still dealing with the repercussions of something that we poured our lives into overcoming," said Gundy.
Other action items include frontline staff being represented on hospitals' Boards of Directors, and zero tolerance policies for abuse from patients and visitors to ensure nurse safety.
Allegheny Health Network declined to comment, and UPMC did not respond to a request for comment.
