Nurses at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center, a 450-bed hospital in Vancouver, Washington, picketed outside their workplace on Thursday to demand higher wages and safer staffing ratios.
They say that at hospitals in Portland, Oregon, just nine miles away, nurses can earn $6 to $10 more per hour than they do. Oregon’s nurses are also protected by a new law — the second of its kind, following California’s lead — that mandates specific nurse-to-patient ratios starting in June. Washington recently passed its own safe-staffing law, but its guidelines are less strict.
Ever since the pandemic, chronic understaffing has been a challenge for health-care professionals around the country. Though there is some debate about the problem’s root cause — whether it’s a shortage of qualified workers or a deliberate decision by management to cut staff and boost profits — PeaceHealth nurses say its ramifications are clear.
Five years ago, one nurse on a medical/surgical unit might have cared for four patients, said Talitha Wilson, a staff nurse in PeaceHealth Southwest’s emergency department. Today, that same nurse might be responsible for five to seven, sometimes eight, patients at a time.
The nurses picketed in order “to get the community involved, let them know what’s happening,” Wilson said. “We are extremely frustrated with what management is doing — or basically not doing.”
PeaceHealth, a Catholic nonprofit hospital system with 10 facilities in Washington, Oregon and Alaska, has been the subject of several labor disputes over the past six months, and staffers have gone on strike in both Oregon and Washington.
“We are extremely frustrated with what management is doing — or basically not doing.”
The 1,465 nurses at Southwest, who are represented by the Washington State Nurses Association, have been negotiating a new contract since January. Unimpressed with management’s response after 13 bargaining sessions, they decided to hold an informational picket. (A picket differs from a strike in that the workers do not withhold their labor: If Southwest’s nurses were scheduled to work Thursday, they did.)
According to their union, Southwest’s nurses have filed 76 internal complaints since the start of 2024, most of them related to staffing. In comparison, Tacoma General, the only Washington hospital that has mandated staffing ratios, saw 11 such complaints.
“I was appalled,” said Bobbi Nodell, the union’s marketing and communications manager, who spent four hours reading through Southwest’s complaints. Though Nodell would not share the documents with High Country News, she mentioned some of the stories that stuck with her: Nurses working 16-hour shifts without breaks, sprinting between call button alarms and caring for twice as many patients as they should have; two nurses being given responsibility for roughly 30 emergency room patients, resulting in several people yelling at them about the wait.
These staffing ratios aren’t merely inconvenient, said Didi Gray, a staff nurse at Southwest and co-chair of the union’s local unit — they’re dangerous. “It’s proven that the more patients a nurse takes per hour, mortality rates can increase,” she said. “It’s proven that if a nurse works many hours without proper rest breaks, more mistakes can happen.”
Higher patient loads also take a heavy emotional toll on nurses. “It causes anxiety, it causes poor self-worth,” Wilson said. “For feeling like you’re not doing a great job or feeling like you’re not able to be that caregiver that you set out to be.” Wilson said her colleagues feel like they are “being punished by management” each time a patient falls or gets pressure sores.
“It’s proven that the more patients a nurse takes per hour, mortality rates can increase.”
In the next contract, Wilson would like to see mandated staffing ratios and significant pay increases. She believes both changes would prevent Southwest from losing nurses to hospitals in Oregon.
In an email to High Country News, a PeaceHealth spokesperson said the company’s proposals have been “highly competitive” with “wage increases, benefits and other incentives.” The spokesperson noted that a federal mediator will attend the next bargaining session, in hopes of soon reaching “an agreement for our caregivers that is fair, competitive and sustainable.”
Wilson eagerly awaits that day. She recently had a dream that she hasn’t had since she first started working as a nurse, almost three decades ago. Many of her co-workers report a similar dream. In it, the nurse completely forgets about a patient: failing to check on them or fill in their chart or give them necessary medication. To Wilson, the reappearance of that dream means just one thing: “We’re seeing too many people,” she said.
Are you a PeaceHealth employee or patient with a story to share? Contact reporter Susan Shain at susan.shain@hcn.org.
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