Business & Tech
St. Vincent Nurses Head To Dallas To Confront Hospital Corp.
Worcester nurses will deliver a petition to Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, the billion-dollar company that owns St. Vincent Hospital.
WORCESTER, MA — Striking St. Vincent Hospital nurses will this week open a new front in their battle to gain a new contract. A contingent of nurses will travel to Dallas to deliver a petition to the hospital's owner, Tenet Healthcare Corp.
The striking nurses say executives at Tenet, which has projected it will earn $3.2 billion this year, need to hear their demands as their strike crosses the four-month mark.
On Wednesday, the St. Vincent nurses, along with caregivers from some of Tenet's California facilities, will present a 16-foot long petition outside the Dallas headquarters. The nurses decided to go to Dallas last month, when St. Vincent began filling positions left open when nurses walked off the job on March 8.
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"Prior to and during the pandemic, our nurses, patients and community suffered greatly as a result of Tenet Healthcare’s failure to provide the staffing and resources we needed to keep our patients safe," nurse and union leader Marlena Pellegrino said in a news release. "Tenet failed to safely staff St. Vincent Hospital while exposing nurses and other caregivers to higher risk of COVID-19 due to lack of proper personal protective equipment. While Tenet pocketed more than $500 million in profits using pandemic relief money, our patients suffered preventable falls and bedsores, dangerous delays in receiving medications and other treatments.”
For-profit Tenet owns dozens of hospitals, urgent care clinics and outpatient surgical centers across the country, including St. Vincent and the MetroWest Medical Center hospitals in Framingham and Natick. The company earned $777 million in net income over the first quarter of 2021 alone.
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St. Vincent hospital executives have made three separate offers to end the strike. But the nurses have rejected all three, saying they do not meet their main demand: to increase staffing across all parts of the hospital.
The Worcester nurses strike is now the second-longest in state history, according to the Massachusetts Nurses Association.
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