I want to encourage everyone in Franklin County to support our nurses this election season as they fight to place the Patient Safety Act on the ballot this November. This law will improve care and save lives by limiting the number of hospital patients a nurse is assigned at one time. Nurses support this measure. It is proven by years of research and has been fully tested by California for more than a decade.
Our nurses have been fighting for improvements to patient safety at Baystate Franklin Medical Center for over a year, and the nurses union and management at Baystate have been unable to agree on staffing issues in current contract negotiations. Nurses need time to give their patients the complex care and education they need and deserve. Equally important, they need adequate time off to rest and recuperate between shifts if they are going to continue to care for us the next day.
Our nurses are burdened by long shifts, mandatory overtime, and short staffing — none of which is conducive to safe patient care. When their union contract expired in December 2016, they tried to negotiate nurse-to-patient limits in their contract. This should raise a red flag for all of us in Franklin County. After all, these patients are our neighbors, our family members, and at some point, ourselves.
It is incumbent upon management, regardless of the industry, to provide their staff with the tools and resources they need to do their work, or the work will not be completed to satisfaction. In this case, Baystate needs to provide adequate staffing to ensure that our nurses can care for their patients or these patients will be put at serious risk. Baystate has shirked this responsibility for too long. And as much as the nurses may suffer, make no mistake — it will be the patients who ultimately pay the price. Baystate managers need to understand that they are accountable to us, the patients and the taxpayers, and that we will not tolerate gross negligence.
Instead of prioritizing patient safety, Baystate has chosen to wage an extensive PR campaign against our nurses and to spend over $1,000,000 to lock our nurses out of the hospital for three days during the first strike alone. One can only imagine what they spent during the most recent strike. Baystate has mailed disingenuous “dear neighbor” letters to everyone who lives near the hospital to smear our nurses. They have taken out full-page color ads in our local newspaper and they have recently contracted with Dewey Square Group, a public affairs consulting firm that promises to help clients “achieve their public affairs goals — whether they be favorable legislative or policy outcomes, successful advocacy efforts, community-based consumer marketing, or high-profile awareness campaigns.”
I may not have the slick veneer of Dewey Square, or their influence, and I certainly don’t have their money, but I for one am not going to take this lying down. I know that the people of Franklin County do not want to live in a society where everything is measured in dollars and cents. We know our hospital is not a factory producing widgets on an assembly line. Our hospital was not built to generate revenue or maximize profits for shareholders. Our hospital was built for the sole purpose of providing high-quality medical care for our neighbors and families.
That is why I have made a personal commitment to help our nurses place the Patient Safety Act on the ballot this November. I am working with a group of like-minded individuals to gather signatures, make phone calls, and work to educate voters on the importance of the Patient Safety Act. If anyone else would like to join us, we would be happy to have you by our sides. You can contact me at sheilaforgreenfield@gmail.com for more information. If you are not able to help, I implore you to talk to your friends and neighbors and to vote “yes” on November 6 for safe patient limits.
Shelia Gilmour is a Greenfield City Councilor and an active member of the labor community in Franklin County.