Nurses at University Medical Center New Orleans became the first group at a private hospital in southern Louisiana to unionize, joining National Nurses United in December 2023. 

UMC is a Tulane University hospital. 

On Oct. 25, the nurses walked off the job for a one-day strike. The strike comes after negotiations between the UMC chapter of NNU and administrators at LCMC Health, UMC’s parent company, broke down.  

The union notified LCMC Health 10 days in advance, as required by law, and LCMC hired temporary nurses to continue patient care until the nurses returned to work. 

The nurses cited staffing shortages, the slow pace of negotiations and safety concerns as reasons for the strike.  Medicare has penalized UMC every year since 2017 for excess rehospitalizations, an indicator of poor patient care.   

“We have to go to the PACU and we have to go to pre-op to pick up our patients. And when they are short, it can cause delays with very emergent cases starting or blood work that needs to be done,” Kaisha Brown, a registered nurse in UMC’s surgical unit, said. 

Nationally, shortages of nurses are widespread, with fewer people pursuing the profession and more nurses leaving, even as demand increases, leading to concerns about patient outcomes and quality of care. 

“When we are not adequately staffed, that means that we have less time as nurses to care for our patients, which can lead to medications being given out late. It can lead to patients becoming more at risk than they are for falls, readmissions, infection rates can go up bed sores and things like that can also happen,” Brown said. 

Another key issue for the nurses is workplace violence.  

“There were three or four incidents this year where the hospital failed to detect lethal weapons before they were actually brought into our patient care setting,” Brown said.  

The strike came after seven months of negotiations between LCMC and NNU. “UMC management has delayed negotiations, including postponing bargaining sessions and refusing to make meaningful responses to nurses’ proposals on key issues such as workplace violence and safe staffing,” NNU said in a press release. 

LCMC did not respond to a request for comment, but in a video posted to the University Medical Center New Orleans YouTube channel, hospital president John R. Nickens IV said the decision to strike was “very disappointing.” Nickens also said of the strike that “their intent will limit access, their intent increases nursing workload, it rings hollow.” 

On Oct. 26, nurses attempted to return to work for their regularly scheduled shifts, but videos and photos posted to TikTok and Instagram show hospital security locking the doors on returning nurses. Nurses at UMC returned to their regular schedules by Monday. 

NNU has no plans for another strike in the immediate future, but the union plans to continue pushing for negotiations for the foreseeable future.  

“We do feel like we’re getting a lot of pushback, but that won’t deter us, so we’ll just keep going to the table to have these negotiations with admin and we’re going to keep fighting for as long as it takes to get admin to meet us in the middle,” Brown said.