MAKING THEIR POINT—Nurses at Los Robles Regional Medical Center were on strike for five days over Thanksgiving weekend. Acorn file photo
Union nurses at Los Robles Regional Medical Center approved a three-year contract deal Jan. 17, ending seven months of intense negotiations sparked by allegations of unsafe staffing levels at the Thousand Oaks hospital.
“We are pleased they have voted to ratify the agreement,” Los Robles spokesperson Megan Merino said in a written statement.
Merino declined to provide details on the terms of the agreement, which are similar to those in a previous proposal rejected by the nurses on Jan. 22.
The hospital’s parent company, HCA Healthcare, and SEIU 121RN—the union representing nurses at HCA’s Riverside Community Hospital, West Hills Hospital and Los Robles—have been in contract negotiations since May 2023.
Mary Hodgkins, a nurse at Los Robles for 16 years and a member of the nurses’ bargaining team, said addressing purported unsafe staffing levels at the hospital was a priority for her and her colleagues.
Hodgkins said the updated agreement included language to improve staffing levels and the promise to hire 40 additional nurses. She expects the new hires to be recent graduates who are paid less than more experienced travel nurses and are also harder to retain.
With the new contract, the nurses will also receive a nearly 17% wage increase over the next three years, more money for taking extra night shifts, increased paid time off accrual, and compensation in exchange for waiving insurance benefits until the end of the year, she said.
Beyond the contract, the union nurses want to encourage the state to enforce the state-mandated nurse-patient ratio. Hodgkins said she and her colleagues are out of ratio—meaning too few nurses for the patients—for nearly every shift of every day because the hospital refuses to hire travel nurses when needed.
Patients can suffer consequences, Hodgkins said.
Treatments, tests and medications either don’t happen in a timely manner or don’t happen at all, and the nurses have no one to assist them or relieve them for breaks, she said.
The conditions prompted nurses to go on strike for five days in late November.
“If you can’t do the things you need to do to manage the patient and prevent them from declining, it takes a toll on you and that’s what’s happening,” Hodgkins said. “I’ve never seen morale so bad in our hospital.”
Los Robles denies the allegations of unsafe staffing levels.
“No one cares for our colleagues more than we do,” Merino said. “Our top priority is the safety of our patients and colleagues, and we are proud of our track record for patient safety. We are consistently recognized as the best of the best among hospitals across the country for patient safety from independent organizations.”
The hospital, Merino said, hired 181 registered nurses in 2022 to stabilize the workforce and was recently named among the top 5% of hospitals in the country for patient safety by Healthgrades.
Hodgkins said the negotiations were long and exhausting.
“It’s been incredibly grueling: long hours and you don’t feel like you’ve done anything productive,” she said. “I find a disconnect with them because they give you a real sense that they have no idea what is going on in the hospitals they own.”
Over the seven months of negotiations, Hodgkins said, the attorneys rarely explained why they were rejecting the nurses’ proposals.
But prior to ratification Merino told the Acorn, “We believe we negotiated a fair agreement as evidenced by the fact that professionals in other units at Los Robles ratified the same collective bargaining agreement as well as all other units at Riverside Community Hospital and West Hills Hospital.”