CVPH Healthcare Workers Continue Fight for Fair Contract

On Thursday, May 21, more than one hundred NYSNA nurses and healthcare professionals at the University of Vermont-Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital (CVPH) held an informational picket to demand safe staffing and a fair contract! NYSNA members were joined at the info-picket by labor and elected allies, including leaders from the Northeast Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, the Plattsburgh City Council and the Plattsburgh Town Council. The informational picket received coverage in the Press Republican, WAMC, and ABC22/FOX44.

Fighting for Safe Staffing

Since last year, NYSNA members have been bargaining for a fair contract that ensures quality patient care for North Country residents. But negotiating with hospital management has proven difficult: after delaying bargaining for months, CVPH management is now making demands at the bargaining table that NYSNA members find unacceptable. Last year, CVPH management unilaterally changed nurse-patient ratios in medical surgical units. NYSNA members say that this has impacted their ability to provide the safe, quality patient care North Country residents deserve. Now, at the bargaining table, hospital management is putting patient care at risk, once again, by attempting to remove safe staffing language from NYSNA members’ contract entirely.  

In addition to changing safe staffing language, hospital administrators are also attempting to cut healthcare workers’ health benefits, which they once touted as a recruitment tool for new nurses.  

NYSNA Eastern Regional Director and local NYSNA nurse leader Vicki Davis-Courson, RN, said: “We are disappointed that hospital leadership has brought us to this point of having to picket and fight for basic worker and patient safety. We know that CVPH doesn’t need to roll back the patient safety standards and good healthcare we have won—they can afford to do the right thing and negotiate a fair contract.”  

What’s Next?

NYSNA members at CVPH will continue to ramp up their fight for a fair contract. May’s info-picket comes on the heels of a speak-out nurses and healthcare professionals held in late April to call attention to the chronic understaffing issues at their hospital. NYSNA members know that their community—and North Country residents at large—rely on the hospital for access to safe, quality patient care; so they won’t settle a contract that prioritizes profits over patients or puts patient care at risk.  

Keep up the great work, CVPH healthcare professionals!