O’ahu Care Facility (OCF) is a Skilled-Nursing Facility that serves up to 70 short-term and long-term patients at a time who require round-the-clock care after being discharged from a hospital. The healthcare workers at OCF are facing the strain of an island-wide (and national) nurses shortage. Nurses and Certified Nursing Assistants are exhausted and overworked.   Up until now, nurses have been habitually left alone with an entire floor of patients after full 8 hour shifts - without a break or relief nurse until a manager strolls in hours later. Nurses are balancing unsafe care of untenable loads of patients, with laws that prevent them from leaving their post even in the most dire conditions.

Their employer, Pacific Skilled Healthcare LLC, has not been bargaining in good faith during the negotiation process. They have failed to schedule negotiation sessions for weeks at a time, shown up unprepared with proposals, and spent significant portions of scheduled sessions in private caucus rather than in discussion with their workers’ at the table. These actions do not show a willingness to work together with employees to resolve issues and do not reflect the spirit of good faith bargaining.

We, the Hawai’i Nurses Association (OPEIU Local 50), are asking the public to sign-on to this petition in support of the workers’ demands at the bargaining table.

Healthcare workers are incredibly valuable both for the services they provide to our communities and for their ever-growing importance in the economy. Workers at OCF have been working short staffed and taking on excessive amounts of mandatory overtime, ultimately impacting the care of patients. They are asking for fair wages and benefits to increase retention and recruitment to ensure safe staffing. Exhausted and overworked staff should not be the norm: patients in Hawaiʻi deserve healthy and rested staff at their bedside.