BI Anna Jaques Hospital RNs to Deliver Petition to Hospital Administration on Feb. 2 at 12:30 p.m. Calling for Immediate Action to Address a Growing Staffing and Patient Safety Crisis

Efforts by the nurses to convince hospital administration to address these concerns and to recruit and retain needed staff (AJH nurses are the lowest paid nurses in the region) to ensure quality patient care have fallen on deaf ears as patients experience delays in care and excessive wait times to be seen in the hospital's busy emergency department

This delivery will occur one year from the date when the nurses first submitted a similar petition, with no solutions taken by management during the intervening 12 months, resulting in more than 90 nurses (28%) of the nursing staff leaving the facility between 2021 and 2023

NEWBURYPORT, Mass., Feb. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On Thursday, Feb. 2 at 12:30 p.m. a delegation of registered nurses at Beth Israel Lahey Anna Jaques Hospital (AJH) will deliver a petition signed by 80 percent of nurses calling on the hospital's administration to address a "worsening staffing crisis" at the Newburyport-based community hospital that is compromising nurses ability to provide the care their patients expect and deserve.  Editor's Note: The delegation will gather outside the main entrance to the hospital at 25 Highland Ave in Newburyport to meet with members of the media who wish to learn more about this issue, and members of the media are invited to join the nurses as they attempt to deliver the petition to the hospital's Chief Nursing Officer Richard Maki, MHSA, RN.

The petition reads in part: "We RNs and co-workers are struggling to provide the best care to the people of this community we love, and we are failing" and provides a list of issues that need to be addressed, including the fact that "nurses at Anna Jaques are the lowest paid in the Merrimack Valley and are leaving for surrounding hospitals where conditions like staffing and compensation are much better."

 The full text of the petition and the nurses concerns, which was signed by 270 of the 339 (80%) nurses on staff at the hospital, can be found at the end of this release.  The nurses chose Feb. 2 for the delivery as it falls on the one-year anniversary of the nurses' effort to deliver a similar petition in Feb. 2022.  Nurses outrage has only grown as in the 12 months between the two petition deliveries, nothing tangible has been done to address their concerns or to stem the exodus of nurses leaving the facility.  In fact, between 2021 and 2023 95 nurses have left AJH, a loss of 28% of the nursing workforce, with the largest proportion of that number being newly graduated nurses – the hope for the future of the hospital's nursing workforce. 

"Thursday being Groundhog Day is symbolic of our senior administration's continued refusal to value its nurses. For over a year, they have refused to work with us in good faith to do what is needed to retain the staff we need to care for this community," said Margaret Mirecki, RN, a frontline nurse on the hospital's Cardiac Care Step-down Unit and a member of the nurses local bargaining unit with the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA).   "Our efforts have fallen on deaf ears, while conditions at our hospital continue to deteriorate, and patient safety becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve and maintain."

The petition delivery is just the latest effort by nurses to convince hospital management to address a host of serious issues impacting the quality and safety of care at the hospital.  This included the nurses going public in November, sounding the alarm about the safety of patient care at the facility due to the lack of needed staff in a number of departments and the recent decisions by the hospital administration to terminate its designation as a trauma center, to close the hospital's pediatric unit and the periodic closure of the hospital's Computer Tomography (CT) scanning service. 

These conditions have resulted in excessive wait times for patients in the hospital's busy emergency department, delays in patient care as overburdened nurses and other staff struggle with excessive patient loads, and the unnecessary need to transfer patients to other facilities at a time when the medical transport services in the region are already strained. It has also caused an exodus of many types of staff who are burnt out from the conditions and those seeking positions in better staffed, higher paying facilities. 

The nurses are also concerned about the recent announcement that Mark Goldstein, AJH President and CEO will be leaving in April, with no announcement of a successor.  As such the nurses will be appealing to the hospital's Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer to take whatever steps are needed to address the ongoing crisis at the hospital.

"Anna Jaques has a long and proud history of serving Newburyport and surrounding communities, and nurses and all of our fellow staff members have played a vital role in that effort," said Walter Keenan, RN, a emergency department nurse at AJH and member the nurses local bargaining unit negotiating committee with the MNA.  "We hope by delivering this petition to our administration and educating the public about these issues, our administration will finally be convinced to work with us to better protect our patients and the communities we all are here to serve."

Full Text of Anna Jaques Nurses Petition

To the Anna Jaques Administration:

We are in a worsening staffing crisis at Anna Jaques. We RNs and co-workers are struggling to provide the best care to the people of this community we love, and we are failing. The Hospital is losing staff and is not recruiting. We need executives to listen to us and to manage solutions.

• Nurses at Anna Jaques are the lowest paid in the Merrimack Valley and are leaving for surrounding hospitals where conditions like staffing and compensation are much better.
  
  
• Management says they don't have to talk to us about that because we are mid-contract. And so, more resign, and management does not have alternative solutions.
  
  
• RNs who work elsewhere also won't come here from surrounding hospitals with better staffing and are safer places to practice for RNs worried about their licenses.
  
  
• In the interim, management needs to negotiate a temporary extra shift bonus with our Union to encourage RNs to pick up shifts here, instead of at surrounding hospitals. Instead, management let the last agreement lapse, and since has refused to agree to an MOA that is equal to our sister hospitals, and that would show they care about retaining current staff.
  
  
• Management constantly breaks the Union contract by offering bonuses and deals under the table to some, instead of bargaining with the Union to offer a fair and equitable agreement for all nurses.
  
  
• AJH executives cut ties with Salem State's RN program, saying they no longer want SSU students for clinicals, and told the school that one of our most highly respected co-workers could no longer be a clinical instructor here. We lost the opportunity to recruit those new nurses!  An unforced error.
  
  
• We need to see the promised resources that were supposed to come from the merged BI Lahey System. We have seen only worsening staffing and supply issues.
  
  
• Since August when most CT techs resigned, we have gone days on end without CT services with management refusing to offer written protocols, presumably because they don't want to admit that CT is closed. Instead we find out when there  is CT by Post It notes on the department window!

The failure to support clinical staff  is ruining the culture of care that AJH is known for- as evidenced by the loss of staff, the closing of Pediatrics, renouncing our trauma center designation, while hiring an unprecedented number of temps (nursing, rad/ CT techs, Respiratory Therapy, etc.) instead of making this a hospital where staff want to come for careers. We call on the administration to support all staff.

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Founded in 1903, the Massachusetts Nurses Association is the largest union of registered nurses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 25,000 members advance the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the economic and general welfare of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public.

SOURCE Massachusetts Nurses Association