Accommodation Should Be Mutual

The labor dispute at Sacred Heart Medical Center will end sooner or later.

When it’s over, how much damage will have been done to the staff relationships that created the hospital’s outstanding reputation?

Or, to put it another way, how much progress will have been made, toward defining Sacred Heart as a beacon for compassionate, high-quality care in the midst of an industry increasingly known for brutal cost-cutting and impersonal machines?

So far, both the nurses and the hospital administration have protected their claims on public support. There is no strike and there is no talk of strikebreakers.

But there certainly is reason for public concern. Sacred Heart is a leading employer and the source of some of our region’s best-paying jobs. It must remain competitive, able to keep the business of cost-conscious insurance carriers. Also, Sacred Heart provides a service in which the importance of quality is best seen from a gurney, rolling down a hall.

Each of the issues in the current dispute ought to yield easily to the good faith for which Sacred Heart long has been known.

Nurses want protection from nasty national trends, such as slashing staff and then requiring that remaining nurses be on-call 24 hours a day, regardless of hardships to their families. Administrators claim Sacred Heart wants no part of those trends. We hope so.

The nurses’ union wants a closed union shop. But this is simply unreasonable. Unions should seek dues on the merits of union services and employees should remain free to join, or not.

While registered nurse wages are good indeed at $48,485 with 10 years’ experience, they also should keep pace with inflation, as both sides propose. The money gap is modest and negotiable.

The knottiest dispute is not about power or money. It’s about respect. Can nurses respect management’s duty to make financial decisions that will keep the hospital healthy? Can management respect nurses as front-line workers who know more than any desk jockey does about how to keep patients well, workloads reasonable and care innovative? Nurses worry that cost cutters will go too far. They want a say in workload policies, which are in fact a subject for good-faith bargaining.

Neither side will win if this is treated only as a power struggle. But everyone will win if the very reasonable request for nurses to have input regarding workload leads to a new decision making process in which each side respects the other and negotiates to accommodate the other’s goals in new ways.

Surely, administrators know they’d be crazy to cut costs so far that patients suffer and malpractice lawyers perch like buzzards above the exits. Nurses surely know they don’t have time to manage the hospital - they’re too busy running it.

Some day, if this dispute comes to a respectful conclusion, Sacred Heart’s nurses, doctors and administrators could combine their talents in a battle against insurance company cost cutters to protect quality of care. May that day come soon.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster For the editorial board