This story has been updated.

More than 1,800 Providence health system nurses and home health workers ended their weeklong strike at 5 p.m. Friday. It was the first major health care worker work stoppage in Portland in more than 20 years.

But it may not be the last.

Experts say nurses unions across the country have been more willing to authorize strikes and to stop work in the last year due to lasting exhaustion from the pandemic and an unwillingness to continue putting up with existing working conditions.

That’s pushed more nurses to accept the risks inherent in a strike: loss of pay, the stress of walking away from patients, and the question of how the public will perceive a strike by health care workers, who are comparatively well compensated.

Heronia “Ro” Woodward is a home hospice nurse who works in East Portland. On Monday morning, along with dozens of colleagues, Woodward picketed outside the small office park in Northeast Portland that is the main office of Providence’s home health and hospice team.

The atmosphere was festive. Passing drivers honked and cheered the nurses. There were donuts, and a Tracy Chapman song playing.

Woodward was thinking of her patients, who she’d last seen the Friday before the strike.

“So much can happen in just 24 hours,” she said. “A patient can be stable today, and then tomorrow, they are in a pain crisis.”

Providence hired temporary nurses from across the country to keep the hospice team staffed during the strike. So Woodward knew...

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