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Frontline health care workers at Portland’s only behavioral and mental health hospital filed for a union election to join the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) July 10.
(PORTLAND, Ore.) – Fifty-seven crisis intervention specialists, counselors, therapists, and social workers at Legacy’s Unity Center for Behavioral Health–Portland’s only psychiatric emergency hospital–filed for union recognition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) July 10. Mental and behavioral health professionals are unionizing to raise patient care standards, improve staffing and safety, gain a voice in care decisions, and ensure equitable pay. The group intends to join the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA). ONA already represents nearly 700 nurses at Legacy’s Oregon hospitals including Unity Center, Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center in Gresham, and Legacy Silverton Medical Center.
Legacy’s Unity Center is a 24-hour behavioral and mental health services center offering inpatient mental health treatment and psychiatric emergency services. Since it opened in 2017, multidisciplinary teams at Unity Center have provided trauma-informed psychiatric treatment to Oregon’s most vulnerable adults and adolescents. Providing high-quality care in a state and health system which haven't adequately funded mental and behavioral health care has created overwhelming challenges for clinicians who have dedicated their careers to helping Oregonians who struggle to meet their basic needs. Frontline health care professionals plan to hold Legacy’s Unity Center hospital leadership accountable to professional standards of health care and improve outcomes for people in crisis.
“We’re experiencing a brain drain. Tenured clinicians who’ve acquired the comprehensive system knowledge and skill set find better working conditions elsewhere rather than stay at Unity. Our efforts to partner with leadership and resolve this problem have been ignored for too long. Unionizing has become our only option to bargain for an appropriate intervention to fix our staffing challenges and, by extension, save lives," said Raffi Serafino, a social worker at Unity Center.
The group will advocate for better patient-to-care-worker ratios to increase capacity and provide appropriate, professional, and comprehensive patient care in a community that is struggling to provide behavioral health care and addiction treatment. In recent years the care center has seen an increase in poor outcomes for people struggling with mental illness and addiction as a direct result of insufficient staffing and resources to meet growing community needs.
“I want to do better than focusing solely on contract compliance, bottom lines and fear of litigation. I want my work to focus on providing the highest quality of clinical services,” said Marty Savell a social worker at Unity Center.
The NLRB is expected to schedule a union election in the coming weeks.
Legacy Health is a multi-billion dollar private nonprofit health system which operates six hospitals, and more than 70 clinics in Oregon and Washington. While many health systems posted losses during the pandemic; Legacy profited. It made more than $400 million in profits from 2020-2022 including nearly $100 million in taxpayer bailouts via the CARES Act. Prior to the pandemic, Legacy’s hospital profits averaged between $44 million to $79 million per year from 2007-2019. Legacy also owns a $1 billion + investment portfolio.
The Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) is the state’s largest and most influential nursing organization. We are a professional association and labor union which represents more than 16,000 nurses and allied health workers throughout the state. ONA’s mission is to advocate for nursing, quality health care and healthy communities. For more information visit: www.OregonRN.org.
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