The National Labor Relations Board has issued a complaint accusing UPMC Altoona of violating federal law by firing a travel nurse for telling the media the hospital tried to force her and fellow nurses to care for too many patients at once.

As a remedy, the NLRB is calling for the hospital to revise problematic provisions of its media guidelines for employees and publicize those changes through postings and meetings in the workplace — with a probable call eventually for reinstatement and back pay for the nurse, according to SEIU Healthcare PA.

The NLRB has set a hearing on the case before an administrative law judge for July, while encouraging the sides to come to a settlement before then.

The hospital claims it’s not at fault:

“This individual was not a UPMC Altoona employee, nor employed by any other UPMC entity at the time of these incidents, but (rather) an agency contractor on temporary assignment,” a UPMC spokesperson wrote in an email. “We acted appropriately and followed the parameters of the agency agreement.”

Dina Norris was working on the ortho-neuro-trauma unit on May 15, 2022, with all five registered nurses caring for seven patients each, when they collectively cited safety concerns for each refusing to take an eighth patient, leading an administrator to say their names were heading for the state Board of Nursing, Norris told the Mirror at the time.

The previous ratio had been one nurse to five patients, but the hospital was contending with a major short-staffing problem.

A week later, Norris, who had won awards for care and had never been disciplined, along with a union nurse who’d been working on the unit that day, spoke on TV about the safety concerns.

A week after that, the hospital canceled Norris’s contract and instructed her agency to include a “do not hire” note in her file that probably applied to all UPMC facilities, Norris said.

By terminating Norris, the hospital violated a National Labor Relations Act provision that protects employees’ rights to speak “concertedly” “regarding the wages, hours and working conditions” of their employment, according to the NLRB complaint.

Employers may not “threaten employees with adverse consequences, if they engage in protected, concerted activity,” the NLRB states on a webpage.

“Activity is ‘concerted’ if it is engaged in with or on the authority of other employees, not solely by and on behalf of the employee himself,” the agency website states.

“The NLRB found that the (hospital’s) media policy is too broad,” Norris said Friday. “I was within my rights as a licensed professional, and a nurse working for UPMC (to speak out to the media.),” she said.

The nurses on the ortho-neuro-trauma unit made a collective decision that none would take an eighth patient, despite orders from management, because they were “at max capacity,” Norris said.

That led to accusations from management that day of patient abandonment.

The “charging party” in her case is SEIU Healthcare PA, even though Norris wasn’t a member and isn’t now.

After her firing, she and the union nurse who also spoke to the media about the May 15 incident, brought the matter to the union, and the union took the case, she said.

The union nurse was not terminated or disciplined by UPMC, Norris said previously.

Norris works now for a different travel agency.

She has not returned to any UPMC facility.

“We’re trying to get some type of responsibility, accountability and change from them,” Norris said of UPMC.

The organization has been “dragging its feet” for almost a year, which shows “deep disrespect” for nurses, Norris said, as quoted in an SEIU news release.

The “respondent” or defendant in the case is not only UPMC Altoona, but UPMC as a whole, which might mean the case could “affect its entire hospital system,” the news release stated.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.