Nurses picket outside Good Sam Hospital in Puyallup. ​‘We are already spread so thin’

The Nurses Association said one of the issues is that Good Samaritan nurses care for one another’s patients in order to take breaks.

“Nurses feel that this method spreads them too thin and is not in a patient’s best interest,” the news release said. “At MultiCare Tacoma General, meanwhile, nurses bargained for and won nurse-to-patient ratios in 2016 which caps the number of patients a nurse cares for, and they operate with break nurses.”