Nurses at Albany Medical Center began working without a contract Thursday after it expired Wednesday.

Both sides have agreed to bring in a mediator. They have been negotiating for several months now. 

Nurses, part of the New York State Nurses Association, demanded the hospital fix what the union said was a staffing crisis.

Nurses who were negotiating spoke to NewsChannel 13 Thursday. They said the long wait times reported in the hospital’s emergency department were tied directly to high turnover of staff, and that while the hospital was bringing in new nurses, it was not doing enough to retain veterans. 

“We cannot have a hospital full of new grads taking care of all of the patients that are getting transported in from other hospitals because they need a higher level of care. They deserve to have nurses to turn to, to guide them through this so that they can be that strong,” Kathryn Dupuis, a labor and delivery nurse.

Albany Medical Center CEO Dr. Dennis McKenna spoke to NewsChannel 13 about long wait times. Asked if the long wait times recorded at Albany Medical Center were acceptable and whether they were due to staffing, he said long wait times were not acceptable, but that they are a regional problem. He said wait times have been going down and the reason for them is more complicated than just staffing. 

“To your specific question, is it about staffing, I’d say the answer is no. We know there’s a lot of demands put on emergency departments, we know that at Albany Medical, obviously as a trauma program, as a children’s hospital, with comprehensive services, there’s significant demand put on us for that. But there are many things that we have done and continue to do to meet those demands,” McKenna said.

The mediator could take about a week or more to come in. Dr. McKenna said it was not unusual for nurses’ contracts to expire, and he was confident they would come to an agreement.