More than 600 registered nurses at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in southwest Baltimore now have their first union contract, which the union says ends the practice of assigning nurses to units outside their clinical competency and ends mandatory overtime. Nurses ratified the three-year agreement on September 19, closing a bargaining fight that began in January 2024 and included one-day strikes in July 2025 and July 2026.
For patients, the most important terms may not be the raises. They are the rules on who staffs a unit on any given shift. Nurses had argued for months that moving staff into unfamiliar specialties put patients at risk.
