New York City hospitals awoke yesterday morning to a walkout of nearly 15,000 private sector nurses. The nurses have been in contract negotiations, but management has refused to settle fair contracts,” according to the New York State Nurses Association. The current contracts expired on December 31, 2025.
These health care workers are asking that new contracts include “enforceable safe staffing ratios, guaranteed health care benefits for frontline nurses, and protections from workplace violence,” according to a release from the New York State Nurses Association. In December, over 100 New York City and state elected leaders signed a letter in support of the nurses, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
On Friday, January 9, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order declaring that “a disaster is imminent” and the strike would “impact the availability and delivery of care, threatening public health.”
This could be “one of the biggest labor showdowns in New York City’s health care system in decades,” reported The New York Times. The grievances reported by the nurses are well known to those working in hospitals, but many Americans are unaware of the conditions nurses face daily.
The striking nurses work at some of NYC’s leading hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center, and Mount Sinai Hospital.
Violence Against Nurses
Although nursing is considered among the most trusted professions, most Americans do not associate nursing with unsafe workplaces. “Violence is just part of the job. Every nurse and health care worker experiences it at some point, ” according to Jason Bloomguist, MAOL, BSN, RN, NEA-BC, CHSE, an assistant professor of nursing at Boise State University. An estimated 8 in 10 nurses face violence at work. As a result, health care workers are more than 4 times as likely to be injured by workplace violence compared to workers in all other industries combined.
The number of violent encounters often goes unreported. The American Nurses Association estimates that only 20% to 60% of incidents are accounted for. Additionally, there is no agreed-upon definition for workplace violence or a definite way of tracking it on the national level.
Nurse-to-Patient Ratios
The ratio of patients to nurses has been a long-term grievance among nurses. The COVID-19 epidemic exacerbated the problem, but 5 years later, the situation has not improved. The ratio of patients to nurses is a major reason cited by nurses for why they want to leave the profession, according to a study reported on by The Clinical Advisor.
“More than three-quarters of nurses said they would consider staying in the nursing profession if there was some limitation on the number of patients they were responsible for and if [they] could hold the employer accountable to maintain those levels,” said Robert Bruno, PhD, director of the PMCR at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and coauthor of the study. “Addressing the staffing and workload is the answer to the problem of why so many nurses are leaving the profession.”
This article originally appeared on Clinical Advisor