Friday, April 15, we met for our fourth negotiations session. We spent time early on wrapping up our discussions of updating LOU and MOU language and moving them into the contract, and updating out of date language. We also worked to address concerns around Staff Meetings, agreeing to provide nurses a virtual option, a recorded option and an in-person option. The goal was to make meetings more accessible to staff to bolster attendance.

The rest of the day was spent getting into one of your most important issues, vacations. We discussed what our common interests are and recognized we both share interests around patient safety, mental health, improved retention/recruitment, among others. Both sides expressed interest in a new system with more transparency that better meets both sides’ interests. We agreed that a new system probably needs to be created to better serve our common interests. We discussed the possibility of creating a system with an electronic published shared calendar and with guardrails used in other hospitals to ensure all nurses can take vacations while still respecting seniority. We will have more to come on this, we anticipate this will be a major item of discussion of the discuss next session.

Please share your ideas for how to make vacations better, including contract language from other hospitals that you think we should consider with your Chair, Sara Bergenholtz at sara.morgan.bergenholtz@gmail.com.

Please wear your "I support my negotiation team" stickers on the next negotiation session on April 28.

Questions? Contact WSNA Nurse Representative Carmen Garrison at cgarrison@wsna.org.