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The registered nurses at UPMC Altoona ratified a new three-year contract Tuesday, after working since the beginning of the year under terms of the old contract -- and after the union authorized its negotiating team in mid-December to issue a 10-day strike notice.
Ninety-six percent of the votes were in favor of ratification, said Paula Stellabotte, president of the SEIU Healthcare PA local, which represents the hospital's 800 RNs, not all of whom are members.
"We are pleased that our nurses have ratified a new three-year contract with the hospital," UPMC stated in an email.
Staffing was the biggest issue, as usual, according to Stellabotte, speaking in a meeting room at a local hotel in the aftermath of the vote Tuesday evening.
Among concessions won by the nurses was a promise to post another 30 jobs, to complement 26 already posted by the hospital, Stellabotte said.
Hiring those additional nurses will help improve patient care, she said.
More nurses means better-rested and more alert caregivers, fewer mistakes and better outcomes, the union said in a news release.
That helps prevent small problems from becoming big ones, thus keeping health care costs down, according to Stellabotte, as quoted in the news release.
The additional nurses are needed now especially, because the hospital census has been high for months and shows no signs of going down, Stellabotte said.
The new contract also calls for nursing staffers to meet a couple times a year with the UPMC system's chief nursing officer to discuss issues, Stellabotte said.
"We want her to understand that all the (UPMC) hospitals are not (like those) in Pittsburgh," she said.
In Pittsburgh, the corporation can move nurses around among multiple institutions there to fill fluctuating needs, while in Altoona, with one UPMC hospital, it can't, Stellabotte indicated.
Moreover, UPMC has an advantage in recruiting for its hospitals in Pittsburgh, because the big city has amenities that Altoona can't match, she said.
And Altoona is at a disadvantage when competing for nurses with nearby Mount Nittany Medical Center, which can afford to pay well, because it is in an area that receives better Medicare-Medicaid reimbursements than Altoona -- and because it benefits more from philanthropy, according to Stellabotte.
The union obtained a cap of 15 percent on annual out-of-pocket premium increases for its UPMC health insurance, according to Stellabotte.
"We wanted to kind of protect health insurance" -- especially given uncertainty about health care costs with the new presidential administration, Stellabotte said.
The new contract calls for improved scheduling and more training opportunities, according to the news release.
Among its concessions, the union accepted a two-year sunset for a program that provides incentive payments to nurses in exchange for agreeing to work overtime, Stellabotte said.
"We wanted to keep it forever," she said.
The nurses will receive annual pay increases of 2 percent, 2.5 percent and 2.5 percent.
Those are typical of contracts nowadays, Stellabotte said.
The average U.S. inflation rate for December was 2.1 percent, according to usinflationcalculator.com.
"We negotiated hard for a fair contract," nurse Sue Delozier said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.