Fresno Community Hospital - What's happening?

Published

Does an ALLNURSES.COM member know what this is about?

http://www.calnurses.org/?Action=Content&id=874

Nurses Undervalued

Letter to the editor

Fresno Bee

May 14, 2005

As a registered nurse of 39 years, I found The Bee's article about Fresno Community Hospital potentially losing Medicare reimbursement because of inadequate nursing services to be quite troubling, but not surprising.

I know many RNs who currently work for Community Medical Centers and many more who have left Community over the years because of the poor way they are treated. Community has lost and will continue to lose many excellent nurses because it underpays and undervalues nurses, as evidenced by stonewalling on the request by University Medical Center nurses for salary parity and retirement benefits. These nurses have been "bargaining" since October 2003.

If a hospital keeps losing its experienced RNs, patient care will suffer. This is the case at Community, where there are too many temporary staff nurses in the emergency room to provide safe, consistent patient care.

To fix its patient care troubles, which are really a need to meet nurse-staffing standards, Community must commit to safe patient care by offering its experienced nurses salaries on a par with community standards, which in turn will attract new nurses.

Rosa M. Huerta

Sanger

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in NICU.

I know they are short staffed, I know a couple of nurses who are now working there. One is prn, the other is on a well-paid contract in ER.

Community "merged" with UMC a few years ago. Since then they have built a new hospital, and the staff are supposed to be merged, too. UMC was unionized, Community is not. It sounds like the nurses are not treated the same, though.

This hospital is mostly in the brand-new building. They have a very busy ER, it's a Trauma center, and they have an excellent Burn Center and ICU. It's a Teaching hospital. They do High Risk Obstetrics, and have a level II NICU. All this used to be UMC. Anything bad from our part of the world is sent there, usually life-flighted, except newborns and peds patients go to CHCC.

Financially, I don't know what they are doing. There are ongoing Union talks, after all, Community was only interested in merging the hospitals, not the union.

It seems to me that they need to keep the staff happy, no matter what it takes.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Join the Discussion