By Tainá Fonseca • Times of San Diego

Copyright timesofsandiego

More than a hundred registered nurses will gather Wednesday at Sharp Healthcare corporate headquarters in San Diego to demand fair pay, treatment and contracts that put patients first.

The rally is set for 9 a.m. Sept. 17. Nurses and workers plan to meet at the Marriott parking lot at 8651 Spectrum Center Boulevard, and march from there to Sharp’s corporate office.

“The ‘Sharp Experience’ is propped up by the workers, and the largest group of workers that Sharp has, by far, is nurses,” said Andrea Muir, president of the union affiliate at Sharp. “There’s no other discipline that even comes close.”

“If you see us fighting for what we feel we deserve, it’s because we are also fighting for what we feel you, the public, deserves from Sharp,” she added.

Muir started working at Sharp in 2007, starting on the administration and support services side while she was still attending nursing school. She was eventually hired on as a registered nurse.

Muir said that unfair policies at Sharp negatively affect nurses and patients alike.

“There is no separation between advocating for the caregivers and advocating for the patients that those caregivers serve,” Muir said. “Without the caregivers being taken care of, there’s nobody to deliver that care in the health system.”

According to the Sharp website, more than 18,000 nurses, staff, physicians and volunteers work for the hospital. In 2024, Sharp HealthCare profit increased by $1.1 billion, yet the nurses and workers say they have yet to see a corresponding improvement in working conditions.

“If nurses are being forced to work in unsafe conditions, they don’t want to work there anymore,” Muir said. “If we don’t keep those skilled nurses, then the quality goes down, and thereby the safety goes down. Those two things are related. That’s an evidence-based statement.”

The nurses are represented by the Sharp Professional Nurses Network, an affiliate of the United Nurses Associations of California and Union of Health Care Professionals. SPNN began negotiations with Sharp Healthcare on July 23.

Union contracts expire on Sept. 30, and thousands of registered nurses at Sharp Healthcare have signed a petition calling for management to provide adequate resources needed to care for patients.

RNs are also asking for better wages, as they say Sharp is not keeping up with the market wages. Because of this, skilled nurses and other workers are choosing to go elsewhere, limiting Sharp in quality and safety. The fewer skilled workers they have, the less they can pass down their knowledge to new nurses and maintain the quality and safety of their practice.

According to Muir, Sharp does the bare minimum state requirement for sick time, while other facilities give their workers double the sick time that Sharp workers get.

“They have this insane sick leave policy that, for many reasons, encourages nurses to basically endanger their co-workers and potentially their patients by coming to work sick,” Muir said. “Do I come to work sick because I don’t have enough sick time, or do I stay home and risk discipline and loss of pay?”

“As Sharp Registered Nurses, we stand strong together and will take all necessary actions, in unity, to protect our patients, our profession, and our community.”