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January 15, 2016

(St. Paul) – January 15, 2016 – Twin Cities nurses represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association agreed to terms of a new three-year contract with five of the six hospital systems.  Nurses will vote to ratify the tentative agreement on Tuesday, January 19, 2016.  The MNA negotiations team is recommending nurses ratify the agreement.

The new contract begins June 1, 2016 and covers 6,000 nurses at Fairview Southdale and Riverside facilities, Children’s Minneapolis and St. Paul hospitals, Methodist, North Memorial Medical Center, and HealthEast’s Bethesda, St. Joeseph’s, and St. John’s hospitals.  Current benefits, including health coverage and pensions, would carry over to the new contract.
… Read more about: Press Release: Nurses, Hospitals Reach Tentative Agreement on New Three Year Contract  »

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By Mathew Keller RN JD, Regulatory and Policy Nursing Specialist

 

“If you don’t stay and work extra, who will take the admission that’s coming?  There’s no one else.”

Sound familiar?

If you’ve been told by your nurse manager that you must work “mandatory” overtime, don’t buy it!  Under Minnesota state law, nurses cannot be disciplined for refusing overtime if, in the nurse’s judgment, it would be unsafe for the patient.

Study after study show that unplanned overtime assignments have a high potential to be unsafe.
… Read more about: Mandatory overtime: just say no  »

Nurses throughout Minnesota know of instances of employers intimidating and retaliating against staff for a wide variety reasons, like reporting unsafe staffing,  speaking up when they disagree with a program or pilot, reporting managerial unethical or illegal behavior, engaging in union activities, and many more.

These types of incidents can cause managers and administration some headaches, but they are all part of the ebb and flow of the employer-employee relationship. Unless, of course, the employee is punished for legal and ethical actions.

Unfortunately, retaliation in the workplace is all too commonplace – and not just in hospitals.

For nurses, the opportunities for retaliation are higher than in many other fields.
… Read more about: Retaliation is a real issue in nursing  »

Mat Keller headshot
By Mathew Keller RN JD, Regulatory and Policy Nursing Specialist

It is with growing concern that MNA has received reports of increasingly ineffective charge nurse utilization in our hospitals.  If you’ve been in nursing for more than a few years, you’ve seen the trend yourself: charge nurses have quickly gone from having no patient assignment, to having a few admits or discharges as needed, to always having half of an assignment, to always having a full assignment… to having two floors?

This alarming new trend is to assign the nurse variously described as a given unit’s “resource,” “foreperson,” and “air-traffic controller” to two units at once.
… Read more about: Is this the End of the Charge Nurse as We Know It?  »