‘Shorthanded’ UM Health-Sparrow nurses consider strike

(Due to reporting error, an earlier version of this story cited the wrong estimate of how many additional nurses Michigan hospitals would need to hire if the state legislature passed mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios. That number, provided by the Michigan Health and Hospitals Association, was 13,000, not 1,300. City Pulse regrets the mistake.)

Leah Rasch worked as a medical surgical nurse at Sparrow Health System for five years before University of Michigan Health acquired it in April 2023.

“A lot of us were excited when they came in. We thought they were going to pump money into things we need, but right now they’ve just been putting it into buildings and signs,” she said. “We deserve more than a logo change. We deserve some changes in the hospital staffing, in keeping patients and us safe. We just haven’t seen it.”

Rasch is among just 15% of nurses who have stayed in their profession for more than half a decade, the recruiting website Zippia.com reported.  Nearly a quarter quit within their first year, while 34% do so within their first two.

Her tenure included serving patients through the COVID pandemic that accelerated the vacancies. She and her peers are pushing for better conditions to help retain more workers as America ages. The United States has more citizens over 65 than ever.

Now, more than 2,000 University of Michigan Health-Sparrow nurses unionized under the Michigan Nurses Association, including Rasch, are voting through Wednesday (Dec. 11) on authorizing a strike, should the union decide to call one.

Prompting the vote is that their contract — signed with Sparrow Health before it was bought out — expired Oct. 31. MNA President Jeff Breslin said his team has spent more than 300 hours across 35 bargaining sessions trying to secure a new contract, but so far, the matter remains “unresolved.”

Jeff Breslin

Further complications came Nov. 19, when UM-Sparrow announced it will end the East Lansing-based Physicians Health Plan by December 2025. It covers more than 65,000 area residents, including a large proportion of MNA union members.

Breslin was blindsided. As of Nov. 14, he said, members believed that PHP coverage would continue under a new contract.

“There was no indication we would have anything different. We were under the understanding that what we were negotiating for was basically the price of the plan and what it covered. It’s hard to believe they didn’t know this was coming,” he said.

UM-Sparrow spokesperson Mary Masson said the “increasingly competitive health insurance landscape” and changes to Medicare policy made the plan “unsustainable.”

“Over the next year, there are anticipated layoffs that will occur as part of the wind-down plan. Every effort will be made to reassign displaced employees and help them with alternative opportunities,” Masson said.

Breslin said the decision only heightens the need for a new contract.

“They’re telling us that they’re looking for another company to provide insurance so we have choices. Right now, we don’t even know what that is, what it’s going to cover and how much it’s going to cost. These are all things that we bargain over in good-faith negotiations,” Breslin said.

Breslin, 54, has worked as a nurse at Sparrow for almost three decades. In that time, he said, he’s watched numerous co-workers exit the field.

“According to the narrative that there is a nursing shortage, we just don’t have enough nurses to fill the positions, which is a twisted representation of what’s really going on. There is a staffing crisis at the bedside. Hospital conditions, pay and benefits have led people to get out of the profession altogether,” he said.

He worries an unfavorable contract will create an even larger gap in adequate healthcare services. UM-Sparrow’s proposal to build a $97 million psychiatric hospital at the site of the former Lansing Eastern High School building and a $32 million healthcare facility under construction near Grand Ledge only add to his concerns.

The nursing shortage is a multi-pronged issue, however. A lack of qualified college instructors has also slowed the pipeline. Nursing programs denied 65,766 qualified applications in 2023, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

“Full-time nursing is not traditionally as flexible as some other professions where people can both work and also teach,” Laura Appel, vice president of the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, said. 

Laura Appel

She called the pairing of an aging populace with the educator shortage a “perfect set of conditions” that led to the nursing crisis. However, Michigan’s gap is narrowing, according to Appel: The state had more than 8,400 nursing vacancies last fall, but that has fallen to just over 5,000. While the MHA declined to comment on the UM-Sparrow situation specifically, Appel was able to speak on the state of the industry in Michigan as a whole. 

“Not only did we reduce the number of vacancies, but we’re also looking good in terms of our retention rate. We have a lower turnover among nurses in Michigan compared to the national average, which I think shows that Michigan hospitals are trying to do everything they can,” Appel said.

The jury is still out, however. Data published by the Health Resources and Services Administration in 2022 indicates that Michigan is on track to have the fifth-largest nursing shortage per state by 2035, with a projected vacancy rate of 15%. That’s despite ranking 10th by population.

Despite the losses, Breslin believes “a majority” of qualified nurses who have left healthcare would return “if conditions improved.”

Many could be enticed through policy changes, he said. He’s keeping an eye on a trio of bills in the state Legislature to require mandatory nurse-patient staffing ratios, create a public database of staffing data and eliminate mandatory overtime. Relatedly, if state legislators opted to participate in the Nursing Licensure Compact, nurses with out-of-state licenses could take their expertise to Michigan with fewer barriers.

Appel said the MHA opposes all three bills but supports entering the compact. According to an MHA survey, Michigan hospitals would have to hire more than 13,000 nurses if the government regulated ratios come to fruition.

Breslin isn’t buying it.

“Most people go into nursing so that we can affect positive change in people’s lives. But when we are stretched so thin that we are barely able to get the minimum things done, we’re not able to treat every patient like somebody’s grandparent, child or spouse,” Breslin said.

Strike or no strike, Breslin said he’ll continue to push forward.

“Frankly, if the hospital focused more on staffing, they would be very solvent and have better outcomes,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”