A handful of UVM Medical Center staff gathered for a rally Wednesday next to new construction taking place on the hospital campus. They chose the location to highlight what they said is a disconnect between the hospital’s $187 million investment in a new inpatient facility and its unwillingness to increase staffing and compensation for licensed nursing assistants and mental health technicians.
“Something has got to give,” said Heather Duncan, a licensed nursing assistant for more than three decades. “Patient care has to come first.”
Roughly 450 licensed nursing assistants and mental health technicians work at the UVM Medical Center, 75 percent of whom have filled out union cards to join the Vermont Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, according to union organizer Matt McGrath. The union already represents nurses at the hospital.
State law allows the group of LNAs, mental health technicians and related workers to elect a collective bargaining representative if they get enough people to fill out cards.
However, the LNAs and mental health technicians are legally considered part of a larger bargaining unit that must include other hospital support staff, such as food workers. They’re asking the hospital for permission to have their own bargaining unit because other support staff don’t provide direct patient care.
Currently no union represents the support staff collective bargaining unit.
Several people at Wednesday’s rally said having their own union would help them be taken seriously by the hospital administration when they advocate hiring more LNAs and mental health technicians to reduce workloads.
The group is also seeking a base wage of $15 an hour, pay incentives for being called to work at the last minute, and a limit on the number of patients they’re responsible for during a shift.
Duncan, the LNA who spoke at Wednesday’s rally, said she frequently has 13 patients during a shift. That’s more than she can serve well, she said, and the result is she can’t always get to them in a timely fashion if they fall or soil themselves. A more reasonable number per shift, she said, would be seven or eight.
LNAs take a course after graduating from high school and get licensed through the state to take care of patient needs like bathing and changing bedpans.
Mental health technicians, who have CPR and de-escalation training, sit with psychiatric patients, especially when patients are potentially suicidal. The LNAs have said they’re often asked to fill in for mental health technicians.
Laurie Aunchman, a staff nurse at the hospital since 1978, said she couldn’t do her job without the LNAs and mental health technicians, whom she characterized as overworked and underpaid. She said she supports their efforts to form their own collective bargaining unit and that it would improve patient care.
Chief Nursing Officer Kate Fitzpatrick said in a statement that patients are safe at current staffing levels. UVM Medical Center is experiencing a “long period of higher-than-normal numbers of hospitalized patients,” she said.
Hospital administrators are working on new initiatives “to help all of our staff, including our LNAs, manage the workload,” Fitzpatrick said.
“We also recognize their right to organize according to established rules and regulations,” she said. “However, the union is requesting that we bypass the normal legal process by voluntarily allowing this group” to join the union.
Fitzpatrick also said she doesn’t see a need for further unionization. “We have the ability to engage directly with our staff to hear and address their concerns,” she said.
