A Wednesday night vote by hundreds of nurses working for UW Health to strike if the hospital system’s management does not recognize their union followed months of conversations, meetings and strategizing among more than 2,000 nurses employed by the largest health care provider in Madison.
Nurses involved in the campaign say that the decision to pursue a job action became increasingly inevitable in the face of the administration’s refusal to respond to their reasons for seeking union representation.
Those reasons include concerns about staffing ratios, the impact of lean hospital staffing on patients and their safety, and a system of councils to get feedback from employees that nurses say ignores the most critical issues.
“They put all these good words into shared governance and having conversations” with employees, nurse Amelia Zepnick said Thursday. Instead, she said, administrators take actions that directly affect patients as well as the people who care for them “without involving the bedside team.”
A former social worker who became a UW Health nurse three years ago after training for her new career, Zepnick said she and her coworkers have high expectations of themselves and of the care they want to provide.
“There’s got to be something we can do to make this better,” she said. Decisions that have disregarded objections made by nurses and other employees “led to this feeling or urgency —...
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