ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - Nurses at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital announced plans to officially strike late Friday night for the second time in four months, but this time to call out the hospitals practices outsourcing of nurse jobs.
Nurses at the hospital will go on strike on next week and it will be a 48-hour strike that will begin on Wednesday, Dec. 27 beginning at 7 a.m. and it will go until Friday, Dec. 29, 6:59 a.m.
In September, nurses at the hospital went on a 24-hour strike, it's first-ever walk-out.
Nurses voted to initiate a strike on Dec. 8 after repeated attempts to get a deal done between the nurses and the hospital.
Among the demands by the nurses include better safety measures for nurses, along with increased staffing of nurses and making sure nurses can have breaks.
Kellie Allen, a nurse at the hospital, says that they have made progress on some of those fronts when she appeared on Total Information A.M. last week, but the issue of outsourcing still is one of the union main priorities.
Allen said she has seen the "travel nurses" do three shifts in a row, sometimes in three different areas. She says she has had to check multiple times to make sure they are policy compliant.
"They don't know our patients, they don't know policy, they don't know physicians." said Allen.