Unionized UW Health nurses are issuing more than 100 forms with patient safety concerns to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services to intensify their calls for the academic health system to make staffing changes.
Nurses with Madison, Wis.-based UW Health are represented by SEIU Wisconsin. The union said it is resorting to the measure of filing forms with DHS to "investigate patient safety problems and hold the administration accountable for solutions" since nurses have pushed for staffing changes since September 2022 but their proposals have been ignored, according to an SEIU release shared with Becker's.
Nurses said the UW Health branch of SEIU Wisconsin created "Notice of Risk to Patient Safety" forms and distributed them to staff nurses at the system, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. This is outside of the hospital's established process for reporting safety concerns or safety events, known as the HERO event reporting system.
Hospital administrators learned about the forms and how the union planned to use them at a September meeting.
"SEIU and a small group of our nurses reached out to us to say they have gathered patient safety issues from UW Health staff and threatened to submit them to the Department of Health Services (DHS) if we did not meet their demands related to compensation," Alan Kaplan, MD, UW Health CEO, said in a Sept. 25 email after the meeting to all system employees, according to the Journal Sentinel. "We told them that any compensation issues would be addressed through our normal processes and requested that the union share those patient safety issues with us so we could review them and take action to address any safety issues. They have so far refused to share them with us."
Nurses maintain they have "tried to solve these problems with UW Health internally for over a year and have shared a detailed summary of the forms with the administration," according to the union.
"Patient safety is not a bargaining chip in this health system," Dr. Kaplan said in the email.
The nurses' move to bring patient safety forms to DHS comes nearly two months after the nurses announced they would intensify pressure on hospital administrators if they did not remove salary caps and provide greater pay transparency, according to the Journal Sentinel.