Nurses raise safety concerns and chronic understaffing at St. Charles Bend; defend union rights
(BEND, Ore.) – Frontline nurses at St. Charles Bend filed multiple unsafe staffing complaints against the hospital May 5. Nurses report St. Charles Bend is severely understaffed and continues to violate Oregon’s hospital safe staffing law–creating health and safety hazards for local patients, caregivers and the community.
The Oregon Health Authority previously cited St. Charles Bend for “repeated noncompliance” with critical aspects of Oregon’s hospital safe staffing law as part of state staffing surveys and investigations in 2017, 2021, and 2022.
“St. Charles’ executives spent years raking in profits and looking the other way while frontline nurses and staff left the hospital. Now St. Charles is short-staffed nearly every shift and we’re concerned for our patients. We need to act now to recruit and retain skilled nurses so our community gets the care they deserve,” said John Nangle, a local nurse and ONA executive team member at St. Charles Bend.
The unsafe staffing complaints filed with the Oregon Health Authority identify St. Charles Bend’s repeated:
- Failure to meet minimum safe staffing standards;
- Failure to provide sufficient replacement staff;
- Failure to create staffing plans to meet the needs of ‘overflow’ and ‘boarding’ patients being treated in hallways or other departments;
- Failure to limit hospital admissions or direct patients to other hospitals when health care providers aren’t able to meet patients’ needs;
- Failure to ensure health care workers have the necessary skills and qualifications to perform their jobs;
- Failure to properly assess and care for the sickest patients while relying on an unapproved acuity tool;
- Failure to implement a hospital-wide safe staffing plan based on nationally recognized standards;
- Failure to provide required meal and rest breaks to staff;
- Failure to correct numerous hospital safe staffing law violations uncovered by a state investigation in April 2022.
St. Charles’ chronic unsafe staffing is directly linked to its failures to recruit, retain and respect frontline nurses. Since 2018, nearly 60% of registered nurses at St. Charles Bend resigned. St. Charles Bend has more than 300 vacant nursing positions as of March 21, 2023 per hospital data.
Decades of research and real-life experience confirm a lack of nurses harms community health and leads to longer wait times and hospital stays, higher costs, more patient infections and injuries, more readmissions and more preventable deaths.
Local nurses also filed two new unfair labor practice (ULPs) charges against St. Charles Bend with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on April 21. St. Charles executives are charged with bad faith bargaining after refusing to provide relevant information about its multimillion dollar contracts with outside staffing agencies and refusing to drop contract proposals which are not mandatory subjects of bargaining. Both are violations of federal law.
Nurses previously filed an unfair labor practice against St. Charles for illegally spying on nurses who participated in protected union activity. The NLRB has opened investigations into St. Charles’ actions and can elect to impose financial, legal or other penalties on companies which are found to have broken the law.
Nurses at St. Charles Bend have been meeting with St. Charles’ executives for nearly 5 months to try to reach a fair contract agreement which improves community health and safety. Local nurses are working to solve St. Charles’ ongoing staffing crisis, raise safety standards, increase recruitment and retention of skilled caregivers, and ensure all Central Oregonians have access to safe, affordable health care.
Nurses are currently working without a contract after the previous agreement expired Dec. 31, 2022. Contract provisions remain in effect while the parties are engaged in negotiations.
The nearly 1,000 frontline nurses at St. Charles Bend are represented by the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA).
The Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) is the state’s largest and most influential nursing organization. We are a professional association and labor union which represents more than 16,000 nurses and allied health workers throughout the state. ONA’s mission is to advocate for nursing, quality health care and healthy communities. For more information visit: www.OregonRN.org.
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