Instead of an RN having four or five patients in her group, she's looking at eight or nine. Williams is shop steward for Local 627 of the Service Employees International Union. Under the current system, she explains, an RN is assigned to a certain group of rooms, but because of paperwork requirements the RNs must delegate many care needs to LPNs, orderlies and aides. At St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Youngstown, several registered nurses are engaged in efforts to organize the facility. We may be one under a management standpoint, but when you take it down to the nursing level it's not OK for us.
Nobody wants to travel back and forth between the hospitals.
We function as a unit because of our knowledge of each hospital, its doctors and our communities. There is no deadline for the NLRB ruling, but Demidovich expects the NLRB to issue its ruling sometime this month. Some 800 RNs are employed at St. Elizabeth's, she says. Downsizing has greatly reduced nursing ranks at her facility, both RNs and LPNs, Demidovich says. You can't put a price on the care you give the patient.