By Nadia Oehlsen
Basem says Broderick denied the conversation took place, though he says several nurses overheard it. Larry Volkmar, a hospital vice president and chief nursing officer, responds that Broderick spoke to the nurse because she was caring for the only patient approved for discharge that morning. “They needed that nurse to come back to discharge that patient,” he says.
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Basem wrote a letter to Diane Samuels, director of labor relations, claiming that putting in the locator system without first notifying the nurses was an unfair labor practice under the National Labor Relations Act. Volkmar counters that Broderick had discussed the locators with nurses at staff meetings last October and November. Yet one nurse says she knew nothing about them until she was handed one on January 7. She consulted other nurses, read the minutes of past staff meetings, and concluded that the information was there but vague and easy to miss. She says, “It was really brief and not very descriptive.”
Nurses were required to begin wearing the locators again on July 13. Shortly thereafter, according to one nurse, a manager chided an employee who didn’t show up on the computer. “It turns out she was in the bathroom, where the locator doesn’t track you,” the nurse says. “That’s the very thing they promised not to do with it.”
Volkmar says he doesn’t know if the union’s distribution of the letter would constitute picketing; he says he’s seen union handbills distributed only once before in his five years at the hospital.
Even when the new locator system seems to be working, Basem says, nurses have recorded instances when the locators showed them being someplace after they’d left. They also complain that the new system’s software can be configured so that the standard warning sound won’t go off when someone activates the intercom, which could allow eavesdropping. And they say that the intercom has turned itself on when no one activated it.
The University of Chicago hospitals and the INA aren’t the first to grapple with how staff locators should be used in hospitals. Hospitals in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area began using them in 1995 and 1996, according to Kate Kline, a labor relations specialist with the Minnesota Nurses Association. “The nurses here are relatively comfortable with it,” she says. The union has won ad hoc written agreements that limit how locator technology can be used from all of the metro hospitals where its members work.
