It’s 2:14 AM. Your phone rings, you look down and see that it’s your mom.
Your dad fell in the bathroom. He’s dizzy and can’t feel his left arm the way he should.
In an instant, you’re throwing on clothes, grabbing the keys, heart pounding. By the time you reach the hospital, your dad’s already been triaged, hooked up to monitors, blood drawn.
A nurse you’ve never met walks into the room, kneels beside his bed, and asks him to describe what he’s feeling. Then, she notices something, a small thing. Something the first set of vitals didn’t show.
So she speaks up, she pulls the doctor back into the room, and within twenty minutes, your dad is being rushed for emergency intervention.
Years later, he’s still here, telling this same story at the kitchen table, holding your kid on his lap. That nurse, whose name you barely remember, is the reason he’s still sharing his story.
Now imagine that nurse didn’t have the time. Imagine she was four patients deep, mid-medication-pass on someone else, halfway down a hallway. Too busy for the moment she would have otherwise noticed, that small change in your dad’s color, that quiet hesitation in his voice, passed by because she was already being pulled somewhere else.
That second version is what nurses at San Juan Regional Medical Center (SJRMC) in Farmington are trying to keep from becoming reality. And it’s exactly why they unionized.
A Community Hospital, and a Community Fight
San Juan Regional Medical Center isn’t just any hospital. It’s community-owned, a bedrock of San Juan County – the place where families go when something goes wrong at 2 AM, where new babies take their first breath, where neighbors show up to take care of neighbors having a hard time.
For decades, the nurses who work there tried to form a union. They tried, and tried, and tried again. Finally, in January of 2026, the nurses voted to unionize and were certified, joining the Communications Workers of America Local 7076.
We sat down for a recent interview with Mary Stephenson and Kati Goldsmith, charge nurses who work in medical units at the hospital. They’re also part of a bargaining committee of 12 to 15 nurses working across multiple areas of the hospital.
They’ve both had plenty of 2 AM moments that remind them why this work matters…
“Time and time again, I can think of events where a nurse’s judgment and the time and space to stop and check their gut feeling is the make-or-break moment for when a patient is crashing,” Stephenson said. “We had a weakened patient who was losing a lot of blood, their blood pressure started tanking, and because we had enough time to work together and communicate, we were able to get them to the ICU to stabilize them. When we’re loaded up with assessments and other requirements, our work is compressed, and that creates risk for everyone involved.”
Goldsmith described what happens on her medical floor when the load gets too heavy:
“Every day we live out how important safe staffing is. We take patients who are severely sick, and hospital leadership keeps adding things to our plate, but we still only have 12 hours to get it done. At some point, not everything is going to get done. I may not be able to bathe a patient or assist them in getting up and walking around, which matters – even though there’s a good reason, like I have to get someone their cardiac medication.”
What the Nurses Are Fighting For
From the beginning, the nurses have led with one core demand: safe staffing.
They didn’t just make the demand, they built a 13-page proposal grounded in evidence-based guidelines, national data, clinical criteria, and nurse-to-patient ratio models. They submitted it as soon as it was finished.
The other elements in their bargaining are tied to the same root cause. For example, there are nurses at SJRMC who have worked there for 30 years, and their wages were capped 15 years ago. That makes it harder to stay rooted in the community, to keep raising your kids next door to your parents, to be the neighbor who shows up.
Hiring incentives are aimed at recruiting new nurses with big sign-on bonuses, but there’s little reward for staying, building, and being part of the place. Hospital management has also leaned heavily on international recruits and travel nurses, which has further eroded local control and community connection.
There’s also a fair-structure fight, which is about lunch breaks, about how discipline works, about whether nurses have a real right to representation. Basic dignity stuff, the kind of things most of us seek from our workplace.
What’s at Stake
At a recent bargaining session in August, the hospital proposed keeping mandatory floating – meaning nurses can be forced to work on units they aren’t trained for – and allowing new graduates to float to any unit within six months of orientation.
The hospital’s “Surge Plan” response to the nurses’ Red Status proposal also didn’t include pay incentives or meaningful solutions for overcrowding, boarded patients, or units exceeding capacity.
There’s still a long way to go, but SJRMC Nurses United is staying focused on what matters and keeping community at the core.
“There’s a stigma about unions in the area, that it’s us vs. them and about money,” Stephenson said. “I would ask people to learn more about us and what we’re doing. We’re actually fighting for our hospital to be better, so that our patients can receive better care, so they can confidently come into the ER or a clinic and know they are safe because the hospital takes care of its nurses.”
And while the normal back and forth of bargaining is still in process, it’s worth mentioning that SJRMC has strong profit margins, so this isn’t a hospital on the edge. This is a community-owned institution that has the resources to do right by its nurses – and by extension, its patients and its community.
What You Can Do
If you live in San Juan County, or know someone who does, this fight is yours. The hospital is yours. The nurses are your neighbors. The patients are your family. Here’s how to make sure hospital leadership knows it:
- Sign the petition
- Send a letter to the Hospital’s Board of Directors / San Juan County Commissioners
- Tell them to encourage hospital management to work for a fair contract & treat the nurses, and this community, with respect and consideration.
- ➡️ Send a letter now
- Submit letter to the editor to Tri City Record or another local newspaper
- Tell your story. Tell your family’s story. It’s important for hospital leadership to know this isn’t just about the nurses, it’s about all of us.
The nurses have done their part. They’ve shown up, they’ve organized, they’ve built proposals grounded in evidence, they’ve come to the table again and again. Now they need the community to show up with them.
Because that 2 AM moment when everything changed for your family, that moment depends on whether the nurse in the room has the time, the support, and the opportunity to do their job.