Yesterday, your bargaining team presented significant economic proposals designed to make PeaceHealth Southwest competitive with the Portland/Vancouver market and improve retention. Here are the highlights from our comprehensive wage and premium proposal:

Major Wage Proposal: A Condensed Scale

Our goal is to close the gap with surrounding hospitals and incentivize nurses to stay by preventing pay gaps early in their careers. To accomplish that goal, we proposed a new wage scale model that is similar to those used at MultiCare and CHI Franciscan. This model eliminates ghost steps and lets nurses reach top step after 25 years of experience, which helps them maximize their earnings earlier in their career. If management agrees to adopt this pay scale, nurses would earn top-step pay rates seven years sooner than they do on our current wage scale, helping us to retain nurses and compete with other facilities in our market across the wage scale.

Home Health & Hospice: One Standard

One of our top priorities is merging Home Health and Hospice nurses back into the main hospital wage scale.

• Unity: We made it clear to management that separating these units is a major dissatisfier and that we are fighting for equal standards.
• Testimony: Alyssa Boswell delivered a powerful presentation on the equity of care, noting that Home Health/Hospice nurses hold the same licenses, degrees, nationally recognized specialty certifications, handle case management and bedside care responsibilities as hospital nurses, and should not be paid less.

Other proposals:

Proposed Premium Increases

We proposed enhancements to recognize your expertise and additional work: in preceptor pay, resource team premium, advanced degrees, and certification pay.

Low Census Improvements

We proposed changes to the language to reflect a more equitable low census rotation.

Break Nurses

We continued our discussion on Break Nurses. This will be an ongoing conversation. Both sides agree there will be break nurses. Leadership is ready to hire, but we recommended they make the break nurse role a rotating assignment rather than a separate job classification. We still need to reach an agreement on the details, but we are confident we can find a mutually acceptable solution.

JOIN US for the Southwest Bargaining Beat – Weekly Virtual Local Unit Meetings

We will be starting up weekly virtual local unit meetings called the Southwest Bargaining Beat, on Wednesday January 7, 2026 at 6:30 pm. These will be recurring meetings each week at 6:30 pm to get updates, discuss the issues, and have bargaining team members available to answer your questions. Click the link below to join us every Wednesday.

Home and Community Nurse-Focused Event Survey Closing 12/23 

We can’t stress enough how important it is for the entire bargaining unit to interact with one another and stand in solidarity. We do, however, want to offer focused meetings specifically for nurses spread across Home Health, Home Hospice, and the Hospice Houses. Specific meetings for each group. To make sure we’re scheduling that meeting when it works best for you, we need your input on into how best to meet, dates, times, locations, and agenda items.

In these meetings, we want to hear from you about how you are doing and discuss the problems specific to your work and how we can work together to improve things. We will, of course, also talk about bargaining, as well as other ways we can make changes, including conference committee and filling out ADOs to document the problems you are facing.

We will start setting up the meetings, and reaching out to all who respond on 12/29.

Home and Community Nurse Breakout Sessions - Interest Survey – Fill out form

Follow us on Instagram at phsw_nurses

In solidarity,

WSNA PeaceHealth Southwest Bargaining Team:
Alyssa Boswell, Home Hospice 
Dawn Marick, MedSurg 
Duncan Camacho, ICU 
Dustin Weddle, ED 
Jacob Clark, CVICU 
Maria Hosseini, Cathlab 
Sam Golden, IMCU
Sarah Albright, Peri-Op 
Toutu Rekucki, MedSurg

Questions? Contact your WSNA Nurse Representative, Bret Percival, at 206-471-0876 or bpercival@wsna.org.