Nurses at SSM Health Dean Medical Group have filed a petition to hold a union election for 380 workers across 10 clinics, SEIU Wisconsin announced, raising concerns about provider burnout, “unfair” pay and staffing issues.
The union yesterday said the move was “inspired by the momentum” generated by nurses at SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison recently voting in favor of unionization. That decision has been certified by the National Labor Relations Board.
Dani Passon, an operating room nurse at St. Mary’s, says “Dean nurses deserve the same voice” as those at the Madison hospital. Passon, who worked in one of the medical group’s clinics for five years, argues its nurses are “understaffed and undervalued” despite working hard for their patients.
“No one realizes how tough it is to work as a medical professional in an outpatient clinic, especially with our sicker patient population,” Passon said in the union’s announcement. “At my clinic, sometimes we would have around 150 calls pour in for just two or three nurses to handle, along with ordering lab tests and communicating with doctors.”
In response to the union’s claims, a spokesperson for SSM Health said the health system greatly values its nurses and “the important contributions” they make every day.
“At SSM Health we respect the rights of our employees to make a free and informed choice about whether they wish to be represented by a union,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, adding “our focus remains on supporting them and continuing to provide exceptional care for our patients and the communities we serve.”
The nurses seeking to unionize work at clinics focused on cancer treatment, urgent care, family medicine, surgery and other specialties.
Krissy Butor, a nurse in outpatient surgery who worked in St. Mary’s for 20 years, says these nurses and others at St. Mary’s, Meriter and UW Health are “united” to ensure the healthcare system prioritizes patients.
She says workers’ top priorities for unionizing include improving staffing, achieving “fair compensation” to help retain experienced nurses, as well as better training for new nurses as well.
“The administration says ‘their door is open,’ but when we approach them to advocate for our patients and ourselves, they just say ‘we hear you’ and nothing happens,” Butor said in the release.
Meanwhile, SEIU Wisconsin is accusing SSM Health leadership of standing in the way of nurses’ unionization efforts by paying a law firm to file objections to the recent St. Mary’s election with the NLRB. The union also alleges the employer is engaged in an “ongoing pressure campaign” and “scare tactics” targeting nurses, including threatening to discipline them for union activities.
