RN Staffing Report April - June 2025

Our first RN contract established a financial penalty of $100,000 to be paid RGH directly to bargaining unit employees for every calendar quarter (three months) that the hospital failed to meet the clinical staffing plans (grids submitted to NYS DOH) on more than 10% of 12-hour shifts (Article 11). That provision went into effect last year, in part because RGH stated that they needed time to ensure that they would come into compliance.

We weren’t surprised, but we were disappointed, when management denied the Q2 (April – June) grievance last year. Though we provided RGH with our calculations in the grievance meeting in July 2025, we didn’t get RGH’s analysis until March 2026. On Tuesday, March 10, 2026, we completed the arbitration on Q2 staffing. We won’t receive a decision for a few months but we’re proud of the work we did to prepare and are confident that we offered a more thorough, accurate, and compelling analysis than RGH leadership.

While RUNAP showed that over 90% of shifts were understaffed, RGH claimed almost the opposite – that over 90% were in compliance with the grids.

View RUNAP’s full Q2 2025 Analysis here.

RGH supplies RUNAP with a monthly report that shows actual staffing and patient census in 4-hour blocks for each of the 25 units with clinical staffing plans. We commissioned a data scientist to write a computer program that compares the monthly staffing reports to each unit’s grid. We provided several calculations – all of them showed consistent understaffing at RGH.

When patients and RNs are combined across all of the units with clinical staffing plans, excluding any same day call-ins above 3%,168 (92.31%) of the 182 12-hour shifts in April, May, and June did not have enough RNs working to staff to the grid for the entire 12-hour period and 100% of 12-hour shifts were staffed below the clinical staffing plan levels for at least 4 hours.

We also looked at each unit individually and explained to the arbitrator that RGH consistently doesn’t schedule enough RNs to staff to the grid minimums. Even if zero RNs called in sick between April – June 2025, RGH wouldn’t have met the staffing grids the majority of time.