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Today, the Oregon Nurses Association announced that 62 psychiatric workers at Legacy’s Unity Center for Behavioral Health voted on Wednesday to unionize. The result was overwhelming, with more than 95% voting in favor.
ONA says it will work to improve patient-to-worker ratios. “Unionizing will allow us to bargain for better working conditions in order to improve patient care,” Holly Friesz, a crisis intervention specialist at Unity Center, said in a press release.
Unity is a 24-hour psychiatric health center, and offers short-term and transition care for people experiencing severe mental illness. At any given time, around half the patients in the facility are there voluntarily, staying on average less than a week, and the other half are civilly committed, staying an average of two months. Legacy has sued the state for not accepting more of those civilly committed patients at Oregon State Hospital, the beleaguered state-run psychiatric institution that now caters almost exclusively to people facing or convicted of criminal charges.
Portland lacks sufficient places to refer people facing extreme mental distress, and Multnomah County has proposed funding nine new sobering beds at Unity Center where police could drop off people in crisis.
But like Oregon State Hospital, the Unity Center is struggling to staff its facility. Earlier this year, its chief nursing officer, June Gower, told legislators that staffing shortages were so severe last summer that “we were forced to cap our beds.”
Legacy Health recently announced it was merging with Oregon Health & Science University. Legacy faced significant financial losses this year, although it made more than $400 million in profit the prior three years, ONA says.