A Kings County Hospital Center nurse practitioner who claims she was suspended in retaliation for union organizing was ordered to report back to work after three weeks away from the bedside, after the city hospital’s system apparently decided to put its misconduct investigation on ice.
The nurse, Sarah Dowd, and her union, the New York State Nurses Association, confirmed that she would return to work Nov. 2 and receive full back pay. NYC Health + Hospitals had been investigating claims of misconduct by Dowd stemming from an allegation that she improperly pulled nurses from their jobs last month to discuss union business. Dowd, who works in the intensive care unit, flatly denied those allegations.
Dowd received written notice of her return to work on Thursday, the day after her first disciplinary hearing with Kings County’s labor relations department, where she arrived flanked by about a dozen colleagues who crowded the lobby of the building in support.
A spokesperson for H+H did not respond to The City Reporter’s requests for comment about the status of its investigation.
“This was total bullshit and I think that we proved that,” Dowd said of Kings County’s claims that her union discussions interfered with patient care. “Now we’re going to go back to doing the work of making sure the hospital is following its contractual obligations, and state law, around safe staffing.”
Health + Hospitals suspended Dowd on Oct. 9, alleging that days earlier she had pulled as many as 10 nurses from their posts to attend a union meeting on the hospital’s campus. Dowd, who was on her day off on Oct. 6, the day of the alleged misconduct, flatly denies claims that she had taken colleagues away from their duties. She said she was in the hospital that day in her capacity as a union official talking to nurses about staffing issues that have plagued Kings County for months, a practice known as “rounding.”
The hospital’s claims, and the union’s objections, were laid out in internal communications between officials from both sides that were included in a formal complaint that NYSNA submitted to the state labor board on Oct. 22.
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The controversy dates to Oct. 6, when Dowd was in the hospital’s medical-surgical unit following up on reports of excessive “floating,” when en hospital administrators assign nurses to multiple departments per shift to make up for staffing shortages.
Dowd said she had “rounded” her own unit and others at the hospital “countless” times without incident in her capacity as the vice president of Kings County’s local bargaining unit — essentially the union local covering nursing staff at the hospital. But H+H claimed that Dowd improperly pulled nurses from their posts in order to discuss union business.
Issues surrounding nurse-to-patient ratios have been a flashpoint of the healthcare labor movement in recent years. It was a major point of contention during the weekslong strike by 15,000 nurses at three private hospital systems in New York this past winter.
Adam Marcus, a Kings County pediatric psychiatry nurse and union official, said that with Dowd’s situation now behind them the union will continue to push hospital leadership to improve staffing.
“Our work isn’t over,” said Marcus.
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