(NEW YORK CITY) – Health Care Workers represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 1 - who were joined by other Health Care Unions and Labor Leaders, are calling on New York State Lawmakers to prioritize safe staffing in the Fiscal Year 2025 State budget.

Health Care Workers from hospitals across the State shared testimonies during a hearing held in New York City, underscoring the impact that pervasive understaffing has had on Worker safety and the quality of care their communities receive.  

Just an hour before the hearing commenced, Workers from hospitals across New York united to ensure safe staffing was top of mind for New York Legislators heading into the hearing, where they’d determine the future of the State’s strained Health Care System.

With patients’ lives on the line, Workers urged Lawmakers to prioritize proposals that support the workforce, as well as hospital funding, following years of widespread recruitment and retention challenges that have left Health Care Workers to deal with dangerous Nurse-to-patient ratios.

Workers called for robust implementation and enforcement of the 2021 Hospital Clinical Staffing Committee Law and for Lawmakers to ensure full Medicaid reimbursement is included in the FY25 State Budget - in addition to proposals aimed at stabilizing the existing health care workforce. 

NYSNA and CWA Members, as well as other Union-represented Health Care Workers, shared testimony at the hearing that highlighted the human impact and severity of the staffing crisis that’s forced Front-Line Health Care Workers to care for too many patients at once, at the expense of patient safety.

“There is no shortage of Nurses.  There is a shortage of Nurses that are willing to work under the conditions we are seeing in our hospitals, our nursing homes, and home care,” NYSNA Executive Director Pat Kane said during the rally.

Decades of underfunding and staffing shortages across New York have plunged the state’s health care workforce into crisis, requiring Workers to push themselves past the point of exhaustion, working mandatory overtime with skeleton crews, Union Representatives said.

Meanwhile, hospitals throughout the State are having to work with negative or unsustainable operating budgets, incentivizing the further reduction of Health Care Workers, exacerbating short staffing, worsening quality of care and further destabilizing the workforce, they added.

In New York state, only 53% of actively licensed Nurses are actively working as Nurses, demonstrating the State is facing more of a shortage of good health care jobs than Health Care Workers themselves, the Unions said. 

The action added to the growing momentum in New York’s Health Care Workers’ ongoing fight to secure safe staffing across the state.

Last month, CWA Workers escalated their efforts with the submission of 8,000 violations of hospitals’ clinical staffing plans to the New York Department of Health (DOH).

The plans were required by the 2021 Clinical Staffing Committee Law, which both CWA District 1 and NYSNA helped write and pass to ensure safe staffing levels and quality patient care across all New York hospitals.

Since it went into effect in January 2023, thousands of unresolved staffing complaints have been filed on behalf of workers by CWA, NYSNA and other prominent Health Care Unions to ensure the law is properly implemented and enforced. 

"Nurses work incredibly hard to ensure we can provide safe, quality care to every patient, regardless of zip code,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said. “We need New York’s hospitals and the Department of Health to work just as hard to deliver and enforce safe staffing to help us do our best.  NYSNA Members in every part of the state report chronic understaffing that compromises care and drives Nurses away from the bedside.  We need to change that immediately by ensuring safe staffing everywhere.”

To Directly Access This Labor News Report In Its Entirety, Go To: NYS Healthcare Workers Raise Alarms on Statewide Staffing Crisis, Demand Legislative Action to Strengthen Workforce, Patient Care in FY25 State Budget | New York State Nurses Association (nysna.org)

Photo Courtesy Of NYSNA.