As members of the community served by Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, many of you may be following the ongoing contract negotiations between the hospitals and their nurses’ union, the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement (CRONA). As many characterizations of both CRONA and the hospitals’ administration have been represented to the public, we wanted to take the opportunity to directly address the communities we serve regarding these negotiations.

Many of you who come to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford Hospital & Clinics do so because these are world-renowned, academic institutions where medicine is not just practiced, but where it is developed, advanced, refined and taught. It is a source of tremendous pride to provide care at such a hospital, but at the same time it can be a tremendous challenge.

From the outside, labor negotiations may seem to represent nothing more than a basic tug-of-war over wages and other terms and conditions of employment. In fact, these current negotiations represent the future of medicine versus the past. The Last, Best and Final contract offers from Stanford and Packard Children’s hospitals to their nurses include very generous compensation and benefits packages; at the same time, these contracts redefine nursing roles according to new and more modern standards and criteria that have been accepted by most other academic institutions. These criteria largely track those adopted by the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

As nurses ourselves, both of whom have been in the industry for more than 30 years, we believe this new Professional Nurse Development Program better reflects and rewards continuing learning, education and skills development by our nurses, and also advances nursing practice at both hospitals to assure we are meeting or exceeding expected patient outcomes. Our nurses are extraordinary, and we have no doubt that most of them are not only able to qualify, but would benefit personally and professionally from doing so. Just as medical standards have evolved over the years, so too must nursing standards. Ultimately, it is the patients who benefit most when nurses and hospitals share a common enthusiasm for continuous improvement.

As industry leaders, Stanford and Packard Children’s hospitals do not have the option to operate under outdated standards of practice or professional roles; doing so would undermine everything we do, from patient care, to research, education and industry leadership. And, contrary to the position that CRONA has taken on these changes, we have no doubt that it would be a disservice to our nurses to suggest that they should do anything but advance with the industry – much to the contrary, our nurses must lead the industry. Being a nurse is extraordinarily hard work, as those of us who have spent our entire careers in this field can attest. But to demand anything less than the very best from every member of our staff, would be a terrible disservice to our care teams, our hospital, our caregivers in training, and – most importantly – to the patients and potential patients we serve.

The local community depends on us for a superlative standard of care, just as the greater community of medicine – nationally and internationally – looks to us to continually advance best practices, procedures and standards. Neither the hospitals themselves, nor the many extraordinary nurses who work for us, stand to gain by holding on to outmoded models of practice.

We stand behind the Hospitals’ Last, Best and Final contract offers because we stand behind the patients we serve through our strict dedication to the very highest possible standards of patient care, patient safety and caregiver performance. And we most certainly stand behind our nurses, with the sincere hope that they will recognize that the entire industry is moving forward at a remarkable pace, and that the hospitals’ offers promise to keep them – and all the patients we serve – at the forefront.

Pamela Wells, RN, RNC, MSA, MSN
Chief Nursing Officer and Vice President of Patient Care at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Nancy Lee, RN, MSN
Chief Nursing Officer and Vice President of Patient Care at Stanford Hospitals & Clinics.