A hospital workers’ union is calling on Northwestern Memorial Hospital to beef up its emergency department staffing, ahead of a scheduled state board vote next week on whether the hospital should be allowed to embark on a $96 million expansion project.

The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board is slated on Jan. 13 to consider the hospital’s application to add 42 intensive care unit beds and a two-story connector between two pavilions, among other things. The board must vote in favor of the hospital’s application before the project can move forward.

The project is partly intended to alleviate backups in the hospital’s emergency department due to a lack of intensive care unit beds, according to the hospital’s application for the project. Those backups have led to “excessive” emergency department wait times and many patients leaving without being seen, according to the hospital’s application.

Ahead of the state board meeting, workers with SEIU Healthcare Illinois held a news conference near the hospital Tuesday, demanding the hospital first focus on safely staffing the emergency department. The union is in active negotiations with Northwestern over its contract, which expires at the end of January.

The union represents about 1,700 workers at Northwestern Memorial, including dietary workers, housekeepers and patient care technicians, among others.

“We appreciate our SEIU-represented employees and the important contributions they make every day,” Northwestern said in a statement Tuesday. “We remain committed to bargaining in good faith.”

Union members say more workers are needed in the emergency department and throughout the hospital. The union is seeking higher wages, pay incentives and the hiring of more staff, said Anne Igoe, vice president of hospitals and health systems for SEIU Healthcare Illinois.

Sometimes the emergency department gets backed up partly because there aren’t enough workers to clean rooms or transport patients from the emergency department to inpatient hospital beds, said Morgan Jurgus, an emergency department assistant at the hospital.

Some days, there may be only six emergency department assistants on-hand, Jurgus said. Emergency department assistants help with tasks such as CPR, splinting and cleaning patients, Jurgus said.

“There are patients that end up waiting six to eight hours in our waiting room, waiting for care, and that causes additional stress on everybody involved,” Jurgus said.

“They clearly have money that they’re willing to invest into the problem,” Jurgus said of Northwestern. “It feels (like) they aren’t willing to invest in us, the workers, the people actually doing the job.”

April McNeal, a unit secretary at the hospital, said workers feel like they’re doing the job of two or three people.

“We are exhausted, stressed and we feel like we’re failing our patients, people who really need us,” McNeal said at the news conference.

Northwestern, however, says its emergency department wait times are in line with other, similar hospitals.

The average time spent in the emergency department at Northwestern Memorial, from the time a patient arrives to the time their visit ends, is about five-and-a-half hours, compared with about four hours at hospitals across the state, according to federal data. Five-and-a-half hours, however, is average across the country for hospitals like Northwestern — large, adult, urban, Level I trauma centers —said Northwestern spokesperson Chris King.

King also said in recent years the hospital doubled the number of housekeepers per shift in its emergency department, and also increased the number of its emergency department transporters by 2%.

Northwestern Memorial also recently gained approval from the state board to spend $56 million on design services for a potential new tower on its Streeterville campus. That tower is slated to have more than 200 beds to help meet demand, according to the hospital’s application for that project.

The tower could open by 2031, if it’s approved by the state board. The project going before the state board Jan. 13 to add 42 intensive care unit beds “will be a critical bridge to address the high ICU occupancy before a new tower can be opened,” according to Northwestern’s application for the project.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/01/06/northwestern-memorial-hospital-union/