Nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Nurses Association have lodged a new round of allegations against Tenet Healthcare, the for-profit owner of the Worcester hospital, alleging dangerous patient care conditions.
The complaint highlights safety concerns related to inadequate staffing, equipment not being properly sterilized, and restrictions on use of IV fluids. The nurses allege these issues resulted in two patient deaths in critical care units.
“It’s unsafe. I 100% feel it’s unsafe, and it breaks my heart to say it,” said Carla LeBlanc, a registered nurse at St. Vincent and member of the Massachusetts Nurses Association board of directors.
The nurses’ union said it has made repeated appeals to management regarding their concerns and filed more than 1,000 official reports showing the conditions that jeopardize the safety of patients.
The complaint, filed earlier this month with state and federal agencies, is the sixth in a series that St. Vincent nurses and the MNA have filed against Tenet. Alongside the official complaint, the nurses union appealed directly to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, asking them to assign on-site inspectors to the hospital and arrange a meeting between the union and the DPH commissioner.
“We’ve been asking DPH to meet with us so that we could talk to the commissioner and make sure that he was well aware of what was going on,” said Mary Sue Howlett, MNA’s associate director of the division of nursing.
A DPH spokesperson confirmed that Commissioner Dr. Robert Goldstein has agreed to meet with the union, although a date for that meeting hasn’t been made public.
“The Department of Public Health takes all complaints seriously and is committed to ensuring that hospitals meet their obligations to provide safe, efficient, high-quality health care for all patients,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The Department has investigated prior complaints about Saint Vincent Hospital and conducted numerous onsite visits to assess their care. DPH has received and is reviewing the latest complaint from the MNA.”
DPH said previous complaints from earlier in December and the complaint in September regarding the death of two patients remain under investigation.
Howlett said staffing continues to be dangerously low on all floors and units, and in direct violation of contractual guaranteed levels that Tenet negotiated with nurses to end the historic 10-month strike in January 2022. In addition to the contract violation, Howlett said Tenet has not complied with a Massachusetts state ICU law that requires strict limits on the number of patients assigned to nurses in critical care units to one-to-one patients, with the assigned nurse permitted to adjust based on the acuity level of the patients.
The complaint shows that on Sept. 29-30, nurses in the hospital’s ICU faxed reports directly to the DPH regarding incidents where the lack of staffing and resources to ensure timely dialysis and other aspects of care were delayed resulting in the death of two of those patients.
“They are making decisions on patients’ access to life-saving and life-preserving fluids not based on the actual needs of patients, but on arbitrary restrictions based on what they believe a specific condition would require,” Howlett said. “In the cases cited in our complaint, the lack of those fluids easily could have resulted in major organ failure. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
Howlett said the latest complaint includes 96 documented soft tissue injuries, commonly referred to as bed sores, of patients in the facility for the first eight months of 2024.
While acknowledging a national shortage of IV fluids, the MNA’s complaint asserts that at St. Vincent Hospital, Tenet CEO Carolyn Jackson has implemented irresponsible and dangerous restrictions on nurses’ access to IV fluids and medications that threaten the safety of patients.
Other key patient safety issues cited in the complaint include an increase in patients falls, delayed or missed medication administration, unmonitored patients eloping from units and in the ED, because of excessive wait times due to understaffing, patients are leaving without being seen.
In a statement, St. Vincent Hospital spokesperson Shawn Middleton said the hospital remains focused on providing high-quality as well as regionally and nationally recognized healthcare services for its community.
“We do not condone the MNA’s tactics of organizing publicity stunts, spreading false rumors and intimidating our colleagues. The MNA’s accusations are disrespectful to the dedicated nurses, physicians and staff at Saint Vincent Hospital who prioritize caring for our patients,” the statement said. “There is no doubt that these unfounded attacks are related to upcoming negotiations with the union at Saint Vincent, a tactic that the union uses in connection with contract negotiations with virtually all other systems across the state.”
The nurses dispute the assertion that the complaint is a union tactic.
“These are financial decisions,” Howlett reiterated and the union points to financial data showing Tenet had a 21% operating margin in the third quarter, among the highest of any health care system. She said after everything that happened with Steward Health’s financial bankruptcy and the impact on patient care, oversight is desperately needed with Tenet.
The bottom line, LeBlanc said, is these issues are putting patients at risk.
“It’s putting nurses at risk. It’s putting nursing licenses at risk, doctors at risk. It’s putting everybody at risk. I think that the simple answer to this is, is we have to work together.”
