Nurses Union Fights Kings County Nurse’s Suspension

A fight over who gets to talk to nurses on the floor of a Brooklyn public hospital has landed before a state labor board. The New York State Nurses Association filed a complaint Thursday with the Public Employees Relations Board, charging that NYC Health + Hospitals suspended an ICU nurse practitioner at Kings County Hospital Center without pay in retaliation for union organizing.

The nurse is Sarah Dowd, vice president of the local bargaining unit covering nursing staff at Kings County. According to The City Reporter, which first detailed the dispute, H+H suspended her Oct. 6 over what it called an “alleged act of misconduct.” The suspension letter gave no specifics. Records the union submitted with its challenge, however, show H+H alleges Dowd improperly pulled nurses away from their duties to discuss union matters. Dowd denies it.

Dowd told The City Reporter she wasn’t on the clock that day. She was in the building as a union official, doing what’s known as “rounding”: walking units to talk with nurses about staffing problems that have plagued Kings County for months. On Oct. 6 she was in the medical-surgical unit following up on reports of excessive floating, when administrators assign nurses to multiple departments in a single shift to cover shortages. She said she has rounded her own unit and others “countless” times over a decade of union work, and that the activity is legally protected as long as it doesn’t interfere with patient care. Any suggestion that she pulled colleagues from the bedside is “categorically false,” she said.

A city hospitals official told The City Reporter that as many as ten nurses had left their assignments to meet with Dowd.

In an Oct. 9 letter, George Lawrence, H+H’s director of labor relations, informed Dowd of the suspension and barred her from H+H facilities “unless you are receiving treatment as a patient.”

H+H spokesperson Stephanie Buhle said in a statement that the system “fully supports nurses’ right to meet with their union representatives as outlined in our contract and as appropriate for patient care,” adding that patient safety is the priority.

The union rallied for Dowd outside the hospital Thursday, with nurses carrying signs reading “Stop Threatening Nurses.” Dowd called her suspension one of the most “outrageous, egregious, disgusting examples of retaliation” she had ever witnessed. “Our hospital will never be safe if nurses cannot raise the alarm about unsafe staffing practices without fear of retaliation,” she told the crowd.

Pat Kane, NYSNA’s executive director, said in a statement she was “profoundly disappointed” and argued that H+H should be working with nurses on chronic understaffing rather than disciplining them for patient advocacy. She pointed to thousands of immigrant healthcare workers who have lost their jobs and an expected influx of uninsured and underinsured patients into city hospitals.

Nurse-to-patient ratios have been a flashpoint across the healthcare labor movement. They were a central issue in the weekslong strike by 15,000 nurses at three private hospital systems in New York this past winter. The complaint now before the state board will test whether a union officer’s walk through the units counts as protected organizing or, as H+H alleges, pulling nurses off their assignments.