Nurses Stage Sickout at 2 County Hospitals Over Stalled Talks

More than 400 nurses at two county-run hospitals stayed away from work Thursday in a job action protesting stalled bargaining talks with county government.

County officials said more than half of the day shift nurses at Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center in South Los Angeles and nearly one-third of the nurses at Harbor-UCLA Hospital in Torrance called in sick in what a spokeswoman for the nurses described as a walkout spurred by anger over pay and working conditions at the hospitals.

“The nurses are overworked; the patient load is extremely heavy; we’re severely understaffed,” declared Ethel Edmunds, a member of the negotiating committee for Service Employees International Union Local 660. “We don’t see any movement on the part of management to get us adequate staffing.”

Pleas to Return

The sickout continued throughout the day despite the morning earthquake and some pleas by union leaders and hospital officials that nurses return to work for public safety reasons. Edmunds said nurses would have broken off the job action “in the event of a true disaster.” She declined to say how long the sickout might last.

The job action did not affect the largest county medical facility, County-USC Medical Center, which also experienced the largest patient load from the earthquake, according to county government officials.

A small group of nurse-anesthetists failed to appear for work at two other county facilities--Rancho Los Amigos Hospital and Olive View Hospital in Sylmar.

Officials at the affected facilities said they coped with the shortage of nurses--and the added stress caused by the earthquake--by filling in with other personnel, some of whom showed up spontaneously to help in the emergency room at King, according to a doctor there.

King did not have any significant increase in patients early in the day as a result of the earthquake, according to a veteran emergency room doctor who spoke on condition he not be identified.

In the morning, the emergency room was staffed by one administrative nurse and five nursing assistants. There were no registered nurses on duty. Interns and residents pitched in to perform staff nursing functions. Ambulance companies were instructed to divert most critical cases to other hospitals.

Outpatient Services Suspended

Outpatient services were suspended and elective surgery was canceled.

In-patient units in two departments--obstetrics and pediatrics--were closed to new admissions. Dr. Ezra Davidson, chief of the department of obstetrics and gynecology, said no registered nurses reported to work for the 7 a.m. shift in the obstetrical, postpartum delivery unit, where 20 new mothers were under treatment. All had delivered babies within the previous 72 hours.

Davidson added, however, that he had a full complement of nurses for women going through labor and delivery. No babies were born at the hospital during the quake, which hit at 7:42 a.m. Two were born during the next hour.

All nurses who reported for the 7 a.m. shift were asked to work 12 hours to help with the evening patient load. The hospital attempted to discharge as rapidly as possible patients in good enough condition to go home.

Harbor-UCLA Hospital canceled elective surgery and declined to accept transferring patients except in “a life or death situation,” according to Toby Staheli, a spokeswoman for the county Health Services Department.

The hospital transferred some patients--particularly those in neonatal intensive care--to several nearby hospitals.

The contract between Los Angeles County and a number of unions, including SEIU Local 660, expired at midnight Wednesday. The pact covers 55,000 county government employees, including 5,000 nurses.

Negotiations have been proceeding sluggishly for months. At 3:30 a.m. Thursday, negotiators for the county and Local 660 reached agreement on a fringe benefit package. Bargaining on wage issues is scheduled to resume today, and Sharon Grimpe, general manager of the local, said she hoped talks could be concluded by the end of next week.

Say They’re Overworked

County nurses have complained about being overworked and poor pay for some time and have held protest demonstrations at King. They were granted strike sanction by the County Federation of Labor several weeks ago.

Edmunds, who has been an emergency room nurse at King for five years, said nurses at Kaiser hospitals in Southern California “make 24% more than we do; nurses at UC Irvine make 9% more than us, plus 41% better benefits, and nurses at San Francisco General Hospital make 29% more than we do. . . .

“The purpose of the sickout is to give management an idea of what we have to deal with on a daily basis. Patient safety is jeopardized at King on a continuous basis (because of understaffing), and management knows that,” she asserted.

Irv Cohen, assistant director of health services for the county, attacked the walkout, saying it aggravated the staffing problems that the nurses have complained about. “The union is worried about giving inadequate care, yet they are pushing that to a greater level” by not showing up for work, he said.

Cohen said there is a 15% vacancy rate among county nurses due to a nationwide nursing shortage.

Dr. James Haughton, King’s new medical director, was confronted by the walkout on his first day on the job. He said the hospital had been aware of the nurses’ complaints for some time. “We have 91 new nursing positions that could be filled, but we can’t fill them,” he said, primarily because county nursing salaries are not competitive with those in the private sector.

About 45% of the 282 nursing personnel--including registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, nursing attendants and ward clerks--did not show up for the 7 a.m. shift at King. At the 3 p.m. shift, 55% of the 177 nursing personnel scheduled to start work failed to appear, Staheli said. At Harbor-UCLA, 32% of 355 nurses scheduled for the 7 a.m. shift failed to report to work. On the 3 p.m. shift, 33% of 189 did not show up.

King is licensed for 480 beds and Harbor-UCLA for 553 beds.

After the earthquake, Grimpe said, she called nurses’ representatives and urged them to tell their members to go return to work “in the name of public safety.”

Times staff writers Dean Murphy, Allan Parachini and Robert Steinbrook contributed to this story.