Port Washington, New York– When thousands of nurses in New York City left their jobs last month in the city The biggest strike One of his kind For decades, 9-year-old Logan Coyle was a patient in the cancer unit at NewYork-Presbyterian Children’s Hospital in Manhattan.
Logan was recovering from his latest relapse in a two-year battle with advanced liver cancer that had already included chemotherapy and a complex triple transplant of liver, pancreas and small intestine.
But when nurses staged a sit-in outside the hospital, he held a handmade sign outside his window that read, “Proud of my primaries.”
Morgan Peeler, one of Logan’s longtime primary nurses, said the sight was a jolt of encouragement in those uncertain early hours of the strike, which, in the beginningNearly 15,000 nurses in some of the city’s most prestigious hospitals participated.
“At that moment, it was kind of reinforced like, ‘This is why we’re doing this,'” she said recently. “If he can fight as hard as he has and as hard as he has, then we can fight this.”
But nearly a month later, more than 4,000 nurses in the New York Presbyterian system are the last on the picket line in a bitter dispute over salaries, staffing, safety, health care and other contractual issues.
The hospitals said that the union’s demands were exorbitant. They say union nurses’ salaries already average $162,000 to $165,000 a year, not including benefits.
The nurses took on the hospital’s top executives Make millions of dollars annually.
Jeff Coyle, Logan’s father, says it’s “infuriating” that some of the city’s most vulnerable patients are stuck in the middle.
“Every day that this continues has a severe impact on us,” he said. “We are the collateral damage of this blow.”
On Monday, the Nurses Union Reaching tentative deals With two other major systems, Mount Sinai and Montefiore. These three-year proposals, if approved in member votes this week, would see unionized nurses at those hospitals back at work by Saturday.
However, negotiations at NewYork Presbyterian progressed more slowly. The hospital says it agreed to a proposal from the mediators that includes many of the things the union sought, including raising wages, preserving nurses’ pensions, preserving their health benefits and increasing staffing levels.
But the union says the strike is still in effect, and there are no plans to resume negotiations as of Tuesday.
Coyle believes hospital administrators should have negotiated more aggressively instead of choosing to hire thousands of temporary nurses to fill staffing gaps week after week.
“If we have to be there, every side of the contract negotiators has to be there as well, working as hard as they can to get this over with as quickly as they can,” Coyle said.
Spokespeople for NewYork-Presbyterian did not immediately comment Tuesday, but the hospital systems during the strike said they remained willing to negotiate when called upon.
Logan returned home over the weekend after having a tumor near his spine removed. But he said he noticed the difference between regular nurses and temporary nurses almost immediately.
Routine matters such as blood draws and laboratory tests took longer than usual for the substitute nurses. Gone are also the regular rounds of familiar faces who come by, often just for a chat or to read a book.
“I like for them to come and color with you, so I’m not spending my whole day on the screen in my iPad world,” he said Tuesday at the family home in Port Washington, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Manhattan on the Long Island suburbs.
“I don’t want to go back there for another month without them,” Logan added. “I would feel safer if they all came back.”
Logan’s mother, Rebecca, says she spent more sleepless nights at Logan’s bedside than during previous hospital stays because staffing was so inconsistent, with temporary nurses moving in and out every few days and bringing different levels of experience.
“I was constantly awake, checking to make sure something was working properly or waiting for the medication to arrive or waiting for the fluid or blood product to arrive,” she said. “I felt like I had to be very vigilant.”
Beller says she worries daily about her patients who stay in the hospital too long.
Bone marrow transplants and chemotherapy have been delayed or canceled entirely for some due to staffing challenges, she said.
“We’re not the only pawns in this, that’s my point,” Beller said. “They are manipulating children’s lives, and I cannot imagine how frustrating this is for our community.”
Spokespeople for NewYork-Presbyterian did not immediately comment Tuesday, but the hospital systems insisted Operations are running smoothlywith organ transplants and other complex procedures largely uninterrupted.
As for Logan, Beeler says caring about the boy, who is endlessly optimistic and positive, has changed her outlook on life.
“He is always the best version of himself and faces everything with a smile,” she said. “I don’t think I would be the nurse, let alone the person I am today, without him and his family.”
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Follow Philippe Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo