🐝 it’s gonna be may

🐝 it’s gonna be may

The May 2025 AURN newsletter is here and take a look to see what cool stuff our union is up to…

Happy to see all the union wins across the city and want to be involved somehow and not sure where to start? Join our contract action team (CAT) and you’ll be in the loop as an advocate for our fellow AURN members. We have virtual monthly meetings and we’ll discuss how to best talk to our coworkers about union updates during bargaining season and have occasional group actions together. All you have to do is fill out the consent to serve form on oregonrn.org/ohsu and you’ll be contacted on next steps. Reminder, if you are already a steward, you’re already a CAT team member. There’s never been a better time to get involved with your union as we get ready for bargaining again!

Speaking of which, consents to serve for our bargaining team are still open until May 30th!

Being on the bargaining team is a larger commitment that involves shaping contract language at the bargaining table with management. Weekly meetings (sometimes more), in-person organizing, prioritizing the needs of our entire bargaining unit, possibly working release time from FTE, and working well in a team environment through at least July of 2026 is what we are looking for. The team is appointed by the AURN Board of Directors (BOD).

AURN showed up for our fellow workers through several events in April and May, including speeches at May Day events, direct testimony to the OHSU BOD supporting our advanced practice providers and their need for their first contract (they have been bargaining over a year!).

Joint statement with Legacy leaders about the failed OHSU-Legacy merger

Happy Nurses’ Week!
This week, we celebrate each other as strong and proud union nurses. We honor the solidarity we have built and continue to prioritize the unity which empowers us to better advocate for our patients, community, and each other. We affirm our commitment to stand by one another, arms locked in solidarity, because we share the same goals.

Throughout the wasteful exercise of the failed merger, we have continued to build relationships, learn from one another, and cultivate the unity needed to powerfully advocate for our patients and communities.

This Nurses Week, we stand together as ONA-represented nurses. We will continue to collaborate as Legacy nurses work to bargain their contracts. We will prioritize solidarity as AURN prepares its membership for the next contract negotiation season.

We will continue advocating for levels of staffing we know to be safe for our patients. We will keep pushing for our workplaces to be free from violence. We will keep advancing the idea that nurses are professionals who deserve to be fairly compensated for the expert care we provide. We will maintain transparency and accountability with each other as unionists, understanding that this is the only way to ensure we remain steadfastly on the side of workers. We will continue doing all of these things because we know they protect our profession, uphold excellent standards, and ensure that every patient receives the expert care that they deserve. We will keep standing together no matter the changing landscape that surrounds us. This Nurses Week and all Nurses Weeks to come, we stand together, union strong.

In solidarity,
Association of University Registered Nurses (AURN)
Legacy Nurses of Emanuel Medical Center
Good Samaritan Medical Center
Mt. Hood Medical Center
Randall Children’s Hospital
Silverton Medical Center
Unity Center for Behavioral Health

With the support of:
Legacy Advanced Practice Providers
Advance Practice United APPs of OHSU

Letter to executives at OHSU regarding their cuts to parent/infant expansion

Hello Brooke, Claudia, Pauline, Anthony and Tim,

The decision to stop planning for the Women’s and Infant’s expansion has raised a lot of concerns for our membership. As noted in your State of Nursing presentation, there has been a dramatic increase in patient load on labor and delivery, mother baby and the NICU without a requisite increase in facilities, staff or resources. In fact, key services have been cut. As you know, this has a dramatic impact on nurse satisfaction and burnout as well as real impacts on safety for staff and patients. As I am sure you noticed, several of our members attended the State of Nursing address, both in person and virtually, with the hopes of being able to ask questions about OHSU’s future planning and commitment to improve services in these specialty areas. We were extremely disappointed that there was not adequate time for us to ask these questions at the event, but wanted to give you all an opportunity to address them. Below you will find statements and questions that not only capture the concerns of our nurses working in L&D, MBU and the NICU, but of our community as our 3922 members receive care for themselves and their families in these units. We look forward to hearing your response and, hopefully, a full commitment to expanding and improving these services to meet the needs of our community.

The units of the Women’s and Children’s are regularly at or over capacity, creating bottlenecks and overfull censuses. The NICU regularly has to compromise patient safety by expanding its services into MBU rooms; they’re forced to put high acuity patients in rooms on a different floor than the NICU that lack essential equipment, like oxygen blenders or individual suction setups. Labor and Delivery is straining to accommodate its existing high-risk obstetric population while the unit becomes a destination for highly specialized fetal surgeries and a regional access point for complex abortion care. When NICU operates over capacity, some babies that become clinically unstable and inappropriate for MBU-level care are asked to remain on MBU, despite inadequate staffing and monitoring capacity. When space is scarce to room everyone that comes to our departments for our world class care, staff are left feeling deprioritized, particularly as hiring is frozen. While the new facility project remains on hold, what investments are being made to address our space needs?

Last year, despite a petition signed by 337 OHSU staff members, multiple personalized messages to our BOD, emails and meetings with multiple OHSU leaders pleading to save our lactation services and consider the gravity of choosing to make cuts in that department, the decision was upheld to half that service, stating the community has elsewhere to go and our budget demands the cuts. Since layoffs we have not had adequate outpatient or inpatient lactation staff to support our breastfeeding parents. This displacement of workload is leaving remaining staff struggling to provide critical breastfeeding education to new parents and their babies before discharge. Many OHSU staff are watching to see the way OHSU navigates issues like this and others with women and children. If the strategic goal remains to make OHSU a destination hospital then we are failing woefully since lactation services is something basic that echoes the integrity of an organization and its dedication to future health. So to this question, is the maintenance of a budget more important than teaching OHSU’s new mothers and parents how to support their infant at the very start of that infant’s health journey to optimal health? Many of us say “no,” we need to do better and restaff our lactation services ASAP.

After the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, Oregon saw an influx of patients seeking abortion care, with state clinicians providing an additional 100-300 abortions per month, (1) many of which have come from out of state and at later gestations requiring more complex care. (2) OHSU’s Labor and Delivery department already sees some of the highest risk obstetric patients in the region, and our status as a safe haven for abortion care has only added to our already strained resources. With more complex care comes longer stays, and physical space has become scarce for the triages and emergencies that come through our doors and those of the Emergency Department at all times of day. These challenges would be enough without the increasing hostility and violence toward all healthcare workers, but specifically those providing controversial care, like abortion and gender-affirming care. The Trump Administration has pardoned 23 individuals who were serving prison time for violently blocking patients from accessing reproductive healthcare, (3) harassment of healthcare workers more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, (4) and it feels like it’s only a matter of time before OHSU is targeted for the essential care we provide. OHSU clinicians would put their lives on the line to provide abortion care, but we shouldn’t have to. How is the University planning to keep our abortion care afloat if federal funding is threatened over our provision of these services, and keep us safe amidst mounting threats to our safety? Is OHSU working with Oregon legislators to safeguard us and the care we’re proud to provide?

Nurses have escalated our concerns about increased violence toward staff, but have not felt heard by OHSU leadership nor feel OHSU leadership is taking this seriously. What can OHSU do to help ensure consistent staffing for Code Greens, as outlined in our contract? Oftentimes, no AOD or Psychiatrist shows up for Code Greens, and nurses are left to de-escalate and defend themselves, without providing training that is also outlined in our contract. We need behavioral contracts that OHSU will enforce and we need OHSU to stop saying that this is just a hazard of the job. Our safety should not be the price of OHSU trying to save money.

This is a statement & question from a NICU Nurse after plans were scrapped for the new building:
“I’m so saddened by this news. Anyone who tours our NICU can tell you what an unreasonable work environment it is. As a new grad nurse who did clinical rotations and a capstone in other NICUs around the country, I was absolutely shocked when I toured OHSU NICU on my first day on the job. I had heard it was crowded, old, and even “janky” by other nurses, but I was in no way expecting what I saw. I was reassured soon after starting this job when I heard a new unit was in the works! I was excited that though it would take time, this was expected to happen in the years following and that I would be able to transition to this new unit eventually. As the idea of the new unit came up, especially around RNs who had been at OHSU longer than I, it quickly became obvious that this had been over promised and under delivered many times in the past. I feel naive for ever even thinking that OHSU would prioritize this unit. With so many beds, families, and nurses (we are one of the biggest if not the biggest unit in the hospital) who are affected by this terrible space every day, I’m appalled at OHSU’s decision. While building another entire section of the hospital may not be in the cards anytime soon, there are other solutions and it feels like this hospital just does not care. It’s an embarrassment compared to most other NICU’s (especially level IVs in the country). And the worst part is that I know in another few years they’ll submit plans again just for them to be turned down a year later. OHSU can do better but they refuse to do so. What is your proposed solution to make this outdated space safe? What is your solution for overcrowding?”

Our dreams died when the announcement came that OHSU was canceling the plans for the new building to support women’s and children’s care. We had hopes for care spaces that would actually meet our patients needs, provide privacy and dignity, and ensure necessary and overdue updates to safety measures. How do we provide dignity to our patients in these care spaces when we are forced to code an infant in front of 3 other babies and their families, because we don’t have private rooms? How do we provide dignity to our patients receiving gender-affirming care when we have to wheel their beds straight from their surgery into a unit covered in gendered language and imagery? How do we provide empathetic care to parents who have been devastated by a fetal demise when babies are crying in the rooms around them? How can we say we value our birthing patients when they are forced to sit in a waiting room, because the labor rooms are full and triage is bursting at the seams? Our community deserves better.

Sincerely, the nurses of AURN

Sources:

1. https://news.ohsu.edu/2023/06/24/one-year-since-the-overturn-of-roe-obgyns-report-devastating-impacts-from-lack-of-abortion-access
2. https://www.contraceptionjournal.org/article/S0010-7824(24)00156-2/abstract
3. https://prochoice.org/our-work/provider-security/2024-naf-violence-disruption/
4. https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/health-worker-mental-health/index.html

Committee report outs

Professional Nursing Care Committee:

For the first time in possibly forever, we are actually going to spend the education funds down to zero before the end of May. This has never happened that we know. It’s good because it means we can try & bargain for increased funding.

How did this happen? We don’t know for sure, but the most likely reason is due to better information dissemination through emails & union newsletters. The FY 25 budget was also made based on numbers from 2024 and we have hired more in the last year. We will have new FY 26 funding in the beginning of July with the first report coming out at the end of July. in June.

What’s been happening behind the scenes? RNs may have been denied funding or have had reduced funding, as we have been trying to distribute what little funds are left equitably, even if they were approved by their UBNPC. . The parameters set have been anyone who has received >$500 for the FY their request is being looked at and reviewed at our upcoming meeting. We are not allowing prepayments for anything after July 1st next FY at this time using the current FY funding. We are trying to prioritize people who have not used any funding. This can be frustrating & confusing. Those of us at PNCC are aware and are trying our best to navigate a new & challenging situation.

Plans going forward?
PNCC will be reviewing our policies and guidelines for approvals for funding. One of the big ones will be equity in distributing funds. Stay tuned and we will communicate to UBNPC’s of those decisions. Keep in mind that if you were funded for a conference this last FY, there is a chance that you may not be able to access PNCC funds this upcoming FY to ensure others have opportunities. That is not an official decision, but we know vacation requests are due soon for the fall and and want to prepare nurses looking to attend conferences in the fall. At this time, we will not be approving funds for the new fiscal year conferences until after July 1st. Also, a reminder we are out of additional education hours until the new fiscal year, too.

Attn: UBNPC chairs, co-chairs & treasurers!!!!
Need to be on the distro list or taken off the distro list? Email felixcr@ohsu.edu for those adjustments.

Non-ratio nurse staffing committee: We have had a large influx of ambulatory staffing plans submitted. Given that we can only review 7-8 plans per month during our meeting, we are adding supplemental meetings when needed. Please be patient if you have submitted a plan to the committee. We will get you scheduled to present as soon as possible. There is still a vacancy for Non Oncology infusion. Please complete a consent to serve or reach out to Cheryl Nicponski with any questions.

Hospital Nurse Staffing Committee: Our contract supports that UBNPCs are responsible for developing staffing plans and acuity tools (section 28.3). This means that management cannot write your staffing plan nor dictate how your tools are used, scored, etc. We have seen and heard how management is currently obstructing this process. If you have direct examples, please reach out to members on the committee. We see and appreciate the hard work that UBNPCs are putting into their plans! We have one vacant seat in acute care. Also… congrats to our new Hospital Nurse Staffing Committee co-chair Rae Kaigler!

Membership: Why do you support our union? Share your thoughts with new folks on your unit and help them see the value of being a full dues paying member of ONA!

Here’s the application and it literally takes two minutes!
https://www.oregonrn.org/page/apply

ONA New Employee Orientation Sessions:

Monday, May 19 at 2:30pm Mac Hall 2201
TUESDAY, May 26 at 2:30pm zoom
Monday, June 2 at 2:30pm Mac Hall 2201
Monday, June 9 at 2:30pm zoom
Monday, June 16 at 2:30pm Mac Hall 2201
WEDNESDAY, June 25 at 8:00am zoom

🗓️ Calendar and upcoming activities

You can subscribe to our calendar to see what’s up with AURN.

Did you know you can attend your AURN Board meetings? We have a new webinar link for the Zoom session which will be Thursday, June 12th at noon!