Nurses at Garnet Health Medical Center are calling out multiple issues, including safe staffing, which are under protracted contract negotiations with the Middletown hospital.
The nurses have been without a contract since September 2025, according to Allison Charles, a registered nurse at Garnet Health Medical Center and a member of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East union.
“Management is refusing to budge on certain key issues we are fighting for,” Charles said in a May 4 email statement.
To draw attention to May 14 contract negotiations with management, hundreds of nurses held an informational picket outside the hospital on April 30, which was joined by New York State Senator James Skoufis, District 42, and Assemblymember Paula Kay, District 100.
“What’re we still talking about safe staffing ratios for?” Skoufis said in a video of the event that Charles shared with the Times Herald-Record. “That is the law in New York state. Really, what we’re talking about here is not even looking for anything above and beyond, just follow the law in the building behind us.”
New York law requires care facilities and nursing homes to form committees composed of management and staff to establish staffing plans with minimum nurse-to-patient ratios.
“The biggest thing on safe staffing,” Charles said in a May 5 phone interview, “we are fighting for fair wages, retiree health care, vision, dental and hearing coverage, IVF testing and genetic testing. They’re trying to propose attendance policies that would be very punitive.”
Though Charles did not explain what those attendance policies were, she said the nurses want policies that instead acknowledge “illness, family responsibilities and unforeseen emergencies.”
“Garnet Health Medical Center respects the union’s right to hold the informational picket and remains committed to our community and dedicated workforce,” Garnet Health spokesperson Marcy Manheim said in a May 7 email statement. “We are continuing to engage in good faith negotiations and are making steady progress toward a fair, mutually beneficial agreement.”
However, Charles wrote in a May 4 email to Times Herald-Record that management stated, “We have exhausted all our good faith.”
What are the issues with staffing ratios?
Two Garnet nurses spoke with the Times Herald-Record regarding safe staffing concerns.
Edna Stachurski, a registered nurse in the post-anesthesia care unit at Garnet and a union delegate, said that under the state’s staffing bill, labor and management together considered hospital staffing needs and concerns.
“And they could not come to any resolution at all,” said Stachurski.
She said that safe staffing was imperative for proper and timely care of patients. When addressing staffing ratios for a unit, it was important to also consider adequate staffing for ancillary staff to support the unit.
“So specifically in the ED, in the emergency room, there is no nurse-to-patient ratio,” said Charles. “So that has been probably the biggest problem.”
In her progressive care unit, the nurse-to-patient ratio was either four-to-one or five-to-one, said Charles, which she considered to be an “OK” ratio, but serious issues arose when a Code Blue occurred and nurses were pulled away from their designated units and their own patients to attend to crisis management as part of the medical emergency response team, sometimes for extended periods of time. Such a situation left that particular unit understaffed, the remaining nurses overburdened, and the patients potentially waiting around for care.
In an email statement, City of Middletown Mayor Joe DeStefano lent his support to the nurses.
“When 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East first came to what was then Horton Hospital, I recognized the importance of giving nurses and frontline staff a strong voice on the job,” DeStefano said. “Our nurses are speaking out about issues that go to the core of patient care, safe staffing, working conditions, and the ability to provide the level of care our residents deserve. They impact real people in our community every single day.”
Contact reporter Vandana Saras at vsaras@usatodayco.com and @orangecountynyreporter on Instagram.
This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Garnet Health nurses push for safe staffing ratios as contract stalls
Reporting by Vandana Saras, Middletown Times Herald- Record / Times Herald-Record
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