Altoona Regional hiring nurses

Altoona Regional Health System will hire up to 60 registered nurses and about 20 nurse aides in the next few months to gear up for the state's mandatory overtime law.

The law prohibits the use of mandatory overtime as a routine staffing tool and goes into effect July 1.

"They're trying to be pro-active," the hospital's RN union president Paula Stellabotte said approvingly, "instead of ignoring or resisting."

The hospital has about 850 RNs now, among 2,400 employees, including both full- and part-timers, said Monica Liebal, the hospital's clinical recruiter.

Additional nurses will help managers in setting up staff schedules, Liebal said.

The decision to hire more nurses has nothing to do with the April 2008 unionization of the RNs by the Service Employees International Union, Stellabotte and Liebal said.

Liebal doesn't think she'll have a problem filling the RN slots, despite a long-running national shortage of nurses.

She's posted the jobs internally, placed ads in the newspaper and has gone to nursing schools and colleges to recruit.

She has received more than 120 applications.

She's reviewing them now and plans interviews for late June and early July.

A year ago, filling the slots might have been difficult, but the national economic difficulties have loosened the worker supply, as hospitals around the area cut back, people who planned to retire thought better of it and those who planned to go part time have stayed full time to keep benefits, Liebal said.

"A lot of nurses, because of the economy, want stability," she said.

The easing of the shortage has made special incentives to attract applicants unnecessary.

Those incentives would have had to be negotiated with the union anyway, Liebal said.

Starting wages will comply with the union wage scale, taking account of experience and qualifications, Liebal said, declining to provide specific amounts.

The ability of the hospital to attract the necessary candidates for the expansion reflects on the area's good highways and lack of traffic-jam bottlenecks, said Marty Marasco, executive director of the Altoona Blair County Development Corporation.

They allow workers to travel in reasonable time to jobs from up to 60 miles away, he said.

It helps make up for the much sparser population here than in big cities, where workers might take twice as long to drive a far shorter distance, he said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.