Montefiore, in the Bronx, has failed to hire nurses to fill 760 empty slots, Ms. Hagan said. Some nurses are tending up to 20 patients at a time in units that are often swamped — especially the emergency room, which is “so overcrowded that patients are admitted in beds in the hallway instead of hospital rooms,” she said.
On Sunday, two other Manhattan hospitals, both run by the Mount Sinai Health System — Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, both on the West Side — reached a tentative settlement with the union, which included a 19.1 percent wage increase over three years.
Hospital officials said they had made the same offer, which provided an additional $51,000 in cash compensation for each nurse and $19,500 in medical payment benefits over three years, to nurses at the Mount Sinai Hospital on Fifth Avenue.
Nurses’ contracts expired on Dec. 31 at a dozen private hospitals in the city, and the union authorized a strike and sent the hospitals a 10-day notice.
In recent days, the union reached tentative contract agreements with most of those hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian, Maimonides Medical Center, Richmond University Medical Center, Flushing Hospital Medical Center, BronxCare and the Brooklyn Hospital Center.
Mount Sinai officials said the decision to strike on Monday would be reckless and would jeopardize patients.
In recent days, Montefiore and Mount Sinai scrambled to make arrangements for the looming strike, including discharging all the patients they safely could, bringing in substitute nurses, postponing many elective surgeries and diverting ambulances to other hospitals.
