Nurses are overworked. Rivers Hills workers hope unionization helps

Workers at River Hills Community Health Centers in south central Iowa were fed up with being overworked and seeing their patients suffer as a result. So they decided to unionize.

Over a hundred workers across six River Hills clinics announced this week in Ottumwa they would unite under River Hills United, affiliating themselves with Teamsters Local 90.

Rivers Hills family nurse practitioner Cassie Dunlavy said her managers have overbooked and double- or triple-booked patients, “even when we told them patient care was being compromised.”

“Morale was really low,” she added. “We wanted to do something that would improve patient care and morale.”

Logan Thomas, a nurse who has been at River Hills since 2021, said what motivated him to organize for a union was the same motivation that got him into nursing: Care.

“I care for patients and I also care for my coworkers,” he said. “Our demands at this rally are for fair treatment and for a neutral stance as we go through our unionization efforts.”

Health care workers unionizing has been stagnant for years, but has started rising in the last few years. Maybe that’s because many of those workers are fed up with the increased workload, stress, and workplace violence after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

‘Dealing with violent patients every day’

Their concerns echoed a registered nurse I just spoke to, Junior Castillo, who worked in the emergency department at UnityPoint Health-Trinity in Muscatine (which is not unionized) during the pandemic.

He told me a combination of his symptoms from long COVID and an increase in violent patients were a major factor in why he wasn’t able to sleep at night, leading to the hospital to terminate him for coming in late one day in 2023—despite what he says was a clean work record for 15 years.

“Dealing with violent patients every day, dealing with violence in the emergency room without being prepared, had a severe toll on my mental health,” Castillo told me. “Instead of helping me out, [hospital administration] saw me as a problem.”

Castillo loved what he did—he got extra disaster training, trained other nurses, and even won a Daisy award for his care. But he doesn’t know if he wants to get a job at another hospital since he’s not sure if the problems have been solved.

“It was a tough job, a very rewarding job, until it wasn’t,” he said. “I know for a fact I’m not the only person who suffered.”

Are you a health care worker in Iowa? What has your job been like since the pandemic began? Email me.