Congressmen Khanna and Deluzio meet with UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital nurses

Democratic congressmen Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania and Ro Khanna of California met Thursday with nurses at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, hoping to help in their push for a fair labor contract with the healthcare giant.

The nurses have been in contract negotiations with UPMC for eight months and say UPMC has engaged in stalling tactics, while UPMC said they are bargaining in good faith.

"The nurses have not been treated fairly," said Khanna, who is considering a run for president.

It comes at a time when the nurses who represent about 900 people — including nurse practitioners and midwives — say they need more staff. It's not because their hospital can't find nurses, they told the congressmen on Thursday. It's because UPMC isn't opening jobs for more. 

"I'm really proud of what we do at Magee. But it's stretching us really thin, and it is tiring us out, and it's not giving the care that I would really like to give," said labor and delivery nurse Liana Montes, who is on the bargaining committee. 

Adrienne Andrews, an obstetrics nurse, said UPMC hasn't been following national standards set for nurse-to-patient ratios. It was something multiple nurses told the congressmen about. 

For instance, Andrews said, the national standards say a woman in labor should have a nurse assigned to them, and them only. Instead, she said one nurse is oftentimes spread between two or three patients.

"If I, as the nurse, am overstretched and drawn too thin between all of my patients, there are things that I can't notice from patient to patient, and that might get missed," Andrews said.

Short staffing is an issue facing many hospitals across the country, she said. The reasons vary, but a frequent issue is that nurses often don't want to work under present conditions and risk their licenses. 

"We're asking for safe staffing," Montes said. "We're asking for better pay for nurses and retention for nurses."

The nurses told the congressmen on Thursday that UPMC has the money to give them what they want, and noted Magee is UPMC's most profitable hospital.

"A lot of folks, including me, were born in that hospital, and so it's an important fight, and it's one that I think they deserve a fair contract," Deluzio said. 

He said he's worked on legislation related to hospital staffing. 

"There's been legislation that I've supported in Washington on safe staffing at, say, nursing homes," Deluzio said. 

Khanna, a progressive Democrat who has called for universal healthcare, said he's working on federal legislation to achieve nurse-patient ratios as they have in California. 

"We should have at least a ratio at minimum, a maximum of four-to-one," Khanna said. "You shouldn't have a nurse having to deal with six, seven patients."

Part of the problem, Khanna said, is how big hospital systems have gotten.

"We need a country that's working for ordinary people, that has a sense of community, that we shouldn't just have profit-oriented capitalism and run amok," Khanna said. 

However, UPMC is a nonprofit. KDKA-TV asked Khanna, with that in mind, what more could be done. 

"We need to make sure that they aren't able to just consolidate and keep buying up hospitals, getting private equity financing to do that because then it becomes, at the bottom line, they want to just drive down costs," Khanna said. 

Khanna has at multiple points shared that he's considering a presidential run. The California Democrat, who grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, said this is roughly his fifth visit to the western part of the state as part of his "new economic patriotism tour." 

At the start of the meeting, it appeared Khanna wasn't too familiar with Magee, asking the nurses who owns it.