GREENFIELD — With contract negotiations underway, registered nurses at Baystate Franklin Medical Center are asking Baystate Health for better wages and safer working conditions.
“We’ve been sounding the alarm for years,” said Donna Stern, a registered nurse in the mental health unit at Baystate Franklin and co-chair of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA). “If you want to retain and recruit, you have to support your nurses better.”
Stern spoke Wednesday evening at a community forum hosted by Greenfield City Council President Sheila Gilmour and the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, during which nurses were offered an opportunity to share their experiences caring for patients during the last two years of the pandemic.
Stern, who is in the middle of her fourth contract negotiation with Baystate Health, said so far, negotiations “have been respectful.”
“Those fights were long and they were hard, and they were really, really difficult fights,” Stern said, referring to past negotiations. “Now, we’re having a different kind of discussion with Baystate, but just because they’re respectful doesn’t mean that we’re moving in the complete direction we want to move in.”
Negotiations started at the end of the year and are the first for the nurses since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to a Massachusetts Nurses Association press release.
The biggest problem that Baystate Franklin is facing, Stern said, is recruitment and retention of its nurses.
“Franklin nurses are well below what they should be making for the work they do,” Stern said. “We’re like any other nurses in the state of Massachusetts, working our tails off in some pretty dangerous situations that have only become more dangerous because of COVID.”
According to Stern, travel nurses at Baystate get paid roughly $5,000 per week; meanwhile, local nurses were offered a 1.25% salary increase in the first year of the pandemic.
“That was their way of thanking us — a 1.25% (raise),” she said. “It’s a slap in the face.”
Even the most senior nurses at Baystate Franklin make about half of what travel nurses are making, according to Nykole Roche, associate director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
“The thing is, (travel nurses) deserve that,” Roche said. “They deserve to have safe housing and they deserve to be well-compensated for incredibly difficult work during an incredibly unparalleled time. But it begs the question why Baystate Health doesn’t think that Baystate Franklin nurses who live in these communities also deserve that.”
Nurses who spoke at the forum shared their early experiences in the pandemic, when there were still many unknowns with respect to the virus itself and personal protective equipment was in short supply. Adequate staffing was also a key concern.
“For part of the first year of the pandemic, nurses were working without adequate PPE,” Roche said. “They were wearing trash bags; they had inadequate masking. Nurses had asked for safe housing … Baystate refused.”
Roche added that hospitals “continue to blame” the lack of staff on a nurse shortage.
“There are nurses more than available,” she said, referring to a graphic that showed a rise in the nursing profession since 2019. “MNA President Katie Murphy said there’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in these conditions.”
Roche outlined the financial state of Baystate Health, which depicted an overall profit of $135 million systemwide in the first nine months of 2021.
“We already know Baystate is not spending those vast sums on staff,” Roche said.
Instead, money is being spent on major capital projects, technological innovations and executive salaries, she said.
“It’s interesting they’re pointing to all of the expansion, without any attention to how they’ll care for the patients there,” Roche said.
She also expressed concern over the closure of three community mental health units, including 22 beds at Baystate Franklin. Mental health treatment at Baystate’s facilities in Greenfield, Palmer and Westfield is being consolidated to the Baystate Behavioral Health Hospital in Holyoke, construction of which is estimated to cost $72 million.
“What’s so important about these beds is because they’re in a hospital, they provide a full spectrum of care,” Roche noted.
Better wages, Stern noted, “is just the start.” Nurses spoke of unsafe staffing levels that existed even before the pandemic.
“Anyone who is still working in that hospital after what we’ve been through is built of some pretty tough stuff,” she said. “I mean no disrespect for people who have had to leave, because it’s been brutal.”
Shaari Mersack, a registered nurse at Baystate Franklin, said while many things have changed since the start of the pandemic — more information, PPE and treatments are now available — “it is still grueling.”
“It’s a great place to work; I just wish I felt valued,” Mersack said. “We really need to pay Franklin nurses so we can attract more nurses to the community hospital, and keep the nurses we have that are so valuable.”
Reporter Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne.