News alert:
The Oregon Nurses Association and its members at Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital reached a tentative contract agreement with Samaritan management late Friday afternoon. The tentative contract agreement includes numerous improvements to raise local healthcare standards including equal pay.
This is breaking news and will be updated.
- YachatsNews
By CHRISTIAN WIHTOL/YachatsNews
After five months of closed-door bargaining for higher pay, registered nurses at Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport are taking their case to the public.
The nurses are staging an informational picket Friday evening in front of the hospital on U.S. Highway 101 to try to turn up the heat on the hospital’s parent, the Corvallis-based nonprofit Samaritan Health Services.
The dispute between management and the 104 unionized nurses centers largely on money.
The nurses’ three-year contract lapsed at the end of June. The sides have been negotiating since March for a new one.
The nurses want raises of nearly 10 percent to bring them rapidly to parity with wages at Samaritan’s flagship hospital in Corvallis, and then to peg further raises to whatever increases the Corvallis nurses secure. The cost of living in the Newport area is as high as the Corvallis area, say the Newport nurses, who are represented by the Oregon Nurses Association.
The hospital administration, meanwhile, has incrementally upped its wage offers to very close to the union’s request. But management has balked at a clause requiring continued parity with wage increases at the Corvallis hospital, according to postings on the ONA website.
Samaritan is “on the right path to reaching a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract for ONA-represented nurses” at Newport, Dr. Lesley Ogden, chief executive officer at Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital said in a statement to YachatsNews. “Our hope is to agree on terms for a package that is competitive in our market and will help Samaritan retain and attract the best nurses to care for our patients and the communities we serve.”
Brook Clark, 28, a registered nurse on the bargaining team, said the cost of housing is steep in Lincoln County.
“Everything is so expensive,” she said in an interview. “We have resort-type prices on rentals and expensive homes.”
The hospital has high nursing turnover and relies heavily on expensive temporary so-called traveler nurses, said Clark, who grew up in Lincoln City, graduated from Oregon Coast Community College’s nursing program and has worked at Samaritan since 2020.
“I hope that setting a fair contract will allow us to see more applicants and get more core (permanent) staff,” she said.
The Newport hospital has 20-30 traveler nurses in addition to the ONA-represented staff, said union spokesman Kevin Mealy. Clark, who works in acute care, said on one of her shifts, the team of five nurses consists of herself, one other staff nurse and three temporary travelers.
With more permanent staff “we would have a good cohesive team,” she said.
Hospital management did not respond to a request for comment about traveler nurses.
In addition to Newport, the nurses at Samaritan’s hospitals in Albany, Corvallis and Lebanon hospitals are represented by the ONA. Nurses at Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City are not unionized.
High wages for nurses
Big dollars are at stake. Brisk pay increases for nurses statewide – including at the Newport hospital — mean that many full-time registered nurses with just a few years of experience are paid in the six figures. Surveys show that Oregon nurses are among the highest paid in the nation.
At Samaritan’s Corvallis hospital, nursing wages are about 10 percent higher than at the Newport hospital, their contracts show.
At Newport, a full-time 40-hour-per-week nurse with seven years’ experience receives a base salary of about $110,000, while at Corvallis it’s about $120,000. The base pay scale at Newport ranges from $88,800 for a full-time nurse with no experience to $135,000 for a nurse with 30 year’s experience.
Nurses argue they are the backbone of a hospital and deserve good pay.
But some experts see rising nurse pay – along with higher pay for doctors, health system administrators, pharmaceuticals, and insurance administration – as driving U.S. health care costs ever higher.
The dispute in Newport is part of a powerful push by registered nurses at hospitals nationwide for higher pay and better benefits. The pandemic drove many nurses to retire, creating a shortage and high demand for their services and giving them strong bargaining muscle.
They’re also increasingly ready to strike during negotiations and to test management’s willpower.
Nurses have gone on strike at 12 hospital systems nationwide so far this year, including at six Providence hospitals in Oregon, and at PeaceHealth RiverBend Medical Center in Springfield. That follows strikes at 30 systems in 2023, and 16 in 2022.
Most nursing contracts are settled without strikes, however, and informational picketing of the kind taking place Friday in Newport has become routine.
A dispute almost identical to the one in Newport is playing out at the Samaritan’s hospital in Albany.
There, the three-year contract covering 231 registered nurses lapsed in June. On Tuesday, the sides tentatively agreed to a deal that gives an immediate raise of 9.25 percent, followed by 5.25 percent in the second year and 3.75 percent in the third. It includes the option for nurses to reopen negotiations if, in the second and third years, raises at Corvallis top the Albany raises, according to postings on the ONA website. It would also allow Albany nurses to strike if the reopened negotiations dragged on past 30 days. The Corvallis contract runs through the end of next June.
Clark said Newport nurses are scrutinizing the tentative Albany agreement.
The Newport nurses want an immediate raise of 9.65 percent, followed by 5 percent in the second year and parity with whatever the Corvallis ONA unit settles for in the third year.
Samaritan is offering 9.5 percent immediately, 4.7 percent in year two, and 3.75 percent in year three. In addition to those increases, nurses would also typically receive annual step raises reflecting their experience. These are usually about 3 percent a year.
In addition to wages, the sides are also tussling over additional pay increments, for example, for being on a flexible-assignment float list, working night shifts, having bilingual skills, instructing visiting students, and holding bachelor’s or master’s degree in nursing.
The wage disparity between the Newport and Corvallis nursing contracts is due in part to when the respective bargaining units last agreed on them.
Newport’s was settled in the early summer of 2021 in the heat of the pandemic, but just before wages for nurses and others began to spiral upward. That’s also when nurse retirements thinned out the ranks and demand for nurses boomed.
At hospitals such as Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis, nurses used their new-found power in the summer of 2022 to secure heftier increases than those in Newport.
The Newport contract, which ran from July 2021 to June 2024, gave nurses raises that total 17 percent in step and cost of living increases over that period. The Corvallis hospital’s contract, which runs July 2022 to June 2025 – the same amount of time as the Newport contract – gives step and cost of living increases totaling 22 percent.
Profits at Newport
Clark points out that the Newport hospital is highly profitable.
Although not a large system, Samaritan Health Services is financially flush and in recent years has grown much stronger despite the pandemic, its financial filings show.
Samaritan Health Services has five hospitals – four of them, including Newport and a sister hospital in Lincoln City — are small and it operates several health insurance plans. In May, Samaritan announced plans to absorb Stayton-based Santiam Hospital and Clinics, which has an acute care hospital, 11 clinics in two counties and more than 600 employees.
Nationwide, many hospital systems sank deep into operating losses during and after the pandemic, as they became crowded with long-stay COVID-19 patients and had to reduce profitable surgeries. They continue to struggle with rising costs.
But Samaritan fared soundly overall in the extended crisis thanks in large part to the profits generated by its Newport and Lebanon hospitals, the system’s audited annual statements and other financial filings with the Oregon Health Authority show. In the period 2017 to 2023, the Samaritan system had an operating loss in only a single year: 2023 – and the loss was small.
It’s strongest performing hospital has been Newport, which reported operating profits every year from 2018 to 2023, totaling $77 million for that period, the filings show. The Newport hospital’s operating revenue in 2023 was $158 million and operating profit was $22.6 million, according to the OHA.
By contrast, Samaritan’s flagship, the 188-bed Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis, struggled financially during the pandemic as did many large hospitals nationwide that had to handle the bulk of severe COVID-19 cases. The Corvallis facility reported operating losses totaling $91 million for the 2018-2223 period.
Consistent profits from the Newport and Lebanon hospitals, plus strong investment portfolio growth have boosted the system’s net worth – all its assets such as buildings, equipment, cash and investment portfolios, minus liabilities such as bonded debt.
At the end of the first quarter of 2024, Samaritan Health’s net worth stood at $578 million, up more than 50 percent from $377 million at the end of 2017. At the end of the first quarter of 2024, it had $453 million in cash and short- and long-term investments, up more than 50 percent from the $297 million total at the end of 2017.
In addition, Samaritan has managed to trim its long-term debt, which now stands at $180 million, down from $237 million at the end of 2017.
Financial analysts also look favorably on the system. In May, the bond ratings company S&P Global affirmed Samaritan’s BBB+ rating – the fourth from the top of S&P’s 10-step grading that ranges from AAA down to D. The “+” indicates Samaritan has strong capacity to pay its debts.
Samaritan is “an essential provider of acute care services in its market,” and has “a leading market share (71 percent) and limited competition due to its geographic location,” S&P said. Plus, it has “low debt and ample unrestricted reserves,” S&P said.
- Christian Wihtol is a Eugene-based freelance journalist specializing in health care. He can be reached at wihtol@Yahoo.com
If Samaritan Pacific Hospital has been so profitable for so long, why did they request that the residents of Newport pay for construction of their new building? And if they are paying down their bond debt, why isn’t any of that money going to pay off the Samaritan Pacific bond debt that shows up as hundreds of dollars every year on Newport residents’ property tax bills? I never did understand how Samaritan Pacific, a financially profitable, private, for-profit entity, managed to convince the public to underwrite their construction.
I’m pretty sure that Samaritan Health Services is a non-profit hospital and healthcare system. That’s how it can get construction funded by bonds.
From the second paragraph: “the hospital’s parent, the Corvallis-based nonprofit Samaritan Health Services.” RIF
I do not know about nurses specifically, but I think it is pretty clear but Samaritan Pacific is understaffed. It seems that about 1/3 or half of the time I need some procedure that’s other than simple imaging, it’s faster to get it done in Corvallis or even Lincoln City than wait for Newport. Latest example, I need a cortisone shot to my hip which must be delivered under x-ray guidance by a radiologist. It would have taken two and a half weeks to have it done at the Newport hospital but instead I scheduled it for only 6 days later at the Corvallis hospital. Of course I have to make the 110 mile round trip drive, which is a pain. It would be nice if Samaritan paid folks enough to want to live here in Newport.
Bravo! Go Nurses!
I hope medical assistants are included–the last time I had a checkup at a Samaritan Health clinic on the coast, the person who was supposed to take my blood pressure, didn’t know how to do it properly, i.e, you don’t put the cuff over clothing. Response I got from the clinic was: “we have so much difficulty keeping staff.” If the “non-profit” –which doesn’t mean not for profit, only that it’s supposed to use its profits in ways related to its corporate purpose- is so flush w/money then why does it seem to be a problem for this non-profit to adequately pay those employees directly fulfilling its “purpose” (or providing health care) to provide health care to people in Lincoln county? RNs, medical assistants, clinic staff, MD/DO, NPs?
Maybe there should be less attention paid to corporate expansion and more paid to fulfilling the alleged purpose of this non-profit corporation. I’ve also wondered why the Newport Health district pushed paying for a new hospital, while Lincoln City did not, instead it sold the property the hospital was built on to Sam Health and let SH pay for construction itself. The Lincoln City hospital buildings seem to have won an award, I don’t think the hospital building in Newport did. I’ve never understood the benefit of the city’s continued ownership (supposedly) of the finished structure & the land it’s on, at least not to the city’s residents/taxpayers. The bond proposal was introduced so close to the voting date that there was way too little time for the bond and decisions made regarding what the new building would include and exclude to be explained before the vote.