PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — After a strike, and months of contract talks, nurses at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Bucks County have reached a tentative agreement with the hospital.
Wages and staffing were some of the big issues in hammering out a contract.
"We'd fallen behind in wages with the surrounding hospitals to the point to where if we didn't raise up our wages we were losing our ability to retain and get nurses into the hospital," said Bill Engle, one of more than 800 nurses that compose St. Mary's union, which formed late last year.
That lack of retention, according to Engle, severely affected staffing and put a lot of extra pressure on workers.
"We had lost 243 nurses over the last year and a half," he said, "because they would come stay two to three years and leave."
"We were having a harder ability to give the type of care that we wanted to, and we felt as though we were losing our voice. So we decided to unionize."
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Engle said the pandemic delayed and elongated contract talks, and never having a contract also made things more difficult than at other hospitals, whose unions have a more established system.
"We were starting from ground zero, so we had to go through everything, so it's a much more arduous process," he said, adding there were some major sticking points both sides needed to come together on.
"The biggest thing at the end, come to find out is health care, staffing and wages. Seems to always be the big three at the end," he mused.
Although contract details have not been released, Engle believes their newly formed union was able to secure fair pay for the nurses.
"People are very happy with what we've done, because there are a lot of other things inside the contract than just the wages," he said.
The union is expected to vote on that agreement Sunday evening. KYW Newsradio reached out to Trinity Health System, which runs St. Mary Medical Center, about the contract, but they did not respond.