Pa. nurses union to add to clout through merger

A Pennsylvania nurses union with 5,100 members, mostly in the Philadelphia area, said yesterday that it was merging with a powerful and deep-pocketed national counterpart.

The move puts the financially struggling Temple University Health System and other unionized hospitals on notice that the nurses union will have more resources to fight staffing cutbacks and organize nurses.

The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals, founded in 2000, said joining forces with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee enhanced its ability to fight for changes that would improve health care, such as a law on minimum staffing levels in hospitals.

The Pennsylvania union, known as PASNAP, typically spends 35 percent to 40 percent of its annual budget, or about $500,000, on organizing, said Bill Cruice, executive director of the union, which is based in Conshohocken.

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California group, said the merger would enable PASNAP to increase the organizing budget by "whatever it takes," without being specific. "We have a considerable amount of more resources," she said.

The combined union will represent 80,000 nurses in all 50 states, union officials said.

Pennsylvania had 203,856 registered nurses as of Dec. 31, according to the state Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs. The bureau does not track how many of those nurses work in acute-care hospitals.

A union competitor to PASNAP, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, represents 8,000 registered nurses, according to its spokeswoman, Lisa Williams.

Gerald Katz of Kurt Salmon Associates Inc., a health-care consulting firm with an office in Plymouth Meeting, said the merger of PASNAP into the California group occurred in the context of a consolidating health-care industry. "The unions need to get bigger to have more leverage to deal in that kind of environment," he said.

The Pennsylvania group represents nurses at 14 hospitals in the state, including four in the Temple University Health System, Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, and Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby.

Several of the hospitals whose nurses are represented by PASNAP are in low-income areas where a large percentage of patients are on Medicaid or Medicare, putting them under severe financial pressure.

At Temple, for example, 78 percent of patients were on some form of government insurance in the year ended June 30. During that year, Temple cut 500 jobs and made other money-saving changes that helped it swing from a $20 million operating loss in fiscal 2006 to a $20 million profit in fiscal 2007.

Cruice disputed the suggestion that his union represented workers at hospitals that tended to be financially weak. "Hospitals represented by PASNAP sometimes do well and sometimes don't," he said.

Cruice said the pay scale at Crozer-Chester, for example, runs from $25 to $46 an hour for a nurse with 25 years' experience. At a nonunion hospital, he said, the typical range is $25 to $38 an hour.

A top priority is getting a law passed in Pennsylvania to regulate nurse-patient ratios in various hospital units, union officials said. California is the only state that has such a law. The final step in its phase-in was completed this week.

A bill in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives would establish such ratios. For example, it would require one registered nurse for every two patients in all critical-care areas.

"We absolutely plan to push for this law in Pennsylvania," said Patricia Eakin, president of PASNAP and a registered nurse in the Temple University Hospital emergency room.

Mark Pauly, a professor of health-care systems at the Wharton School, said adding staff likely improves hospital care, but paying for it is difficult for many cash-strapped hospitals. "They can't be pushed very far," he said.