Nurse walkout looms at Aroostook Medical Center
The Aroostook Medical Center in Presque Isle is facing a two-day strike from 200 unionized nurses if the medical center doesn’t add nursing staff, a goal that they’ve sought for at least five years in contract negotiations.
“The beds are almost always full of acutely ill patients,” Kim Cooper, a surgery nurse and union bargaining team member, said at a June rally held by the Maine State Nurses Association, the Bangor Daily News reports. “They have a lot of illnesses, so you’re not just treating the one illness that brought them in, you’re treating the whole disease process.”
Cooper told the BDN that the MSNA and TAMC have met a half-dozen times in the last few months to negotiate a new contract following the expiration of the previous agreement on July 7. Although the two organizations agree on a number of issues, represented nurses say that increasing the nurse-to-patient ratio to one nurse for every three patients will slow turnover in a staff now stretched thin by the workload.
If contract negotiations aren’t successful, the BDN reports that MSNA says that the two-day strike will be on July 22 and 23.
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