Nurses at the Fair Acres Geriatric Center Tuesday asked Delaware County Council to find a way to increase their wages amid a countywide pay freeze and to increase staffing levels at the Middletown facility.

“We feel that our nurses work very hard and we take care of our residents every day and we really want to get a raise somehow,” said Angela Cottman, a Fair Acres nurse.

Nurses and other health care professionals at Fair Acres voted in favor of forming a union in June and are currently negotiating a contract with the county. Wage increases and staffing concerns were routinely cited as prime motivators to organize leading up to that vote.

Full-time registered nurses earn about $27 per hour, or $57,000 a year. Part-time RNs earn about $25 an hour.

County council Chairman Jack Whelan said he did not doubt the nurses deserve a raise, but economic forces won’t allow for one. He said publicly for the first time during the meeting that no county employee will receive a wage increase in 2010 as part of cost-cutting measures council has undertaken in the past two years.

“When we first recognized the fact of, right away, that 2009 wasn’t going to be a great year, in the middle of 2008, we started a massive cutting campaign where we were going forward cutting and trying to save costs,” he said. “When we got into 2009, we continued to work diligently on the budget looking at our projections for 2010, but something happened that we probably didn’t expect, and that is the economy went from bad to worse.”

Whelan said council decided to increase taxes this year by about $48 for the average homeowner, in lieu of “substantial” layoffs.

“I’d hope that the county employees recognize the fact that it’s better to hold the line on raises, just for this year hopefully, than it is to lay people off and go in and try to reduce our staffing,” said Whelan.

He added that if nurses have any concerns about wasteful spending to provide that information to council. Fair Acres nurse Tanisha Salters said the nursing home sometimes hires from outside the available nursing pool, which she said could be done away with to free up money for additional staffing levels.

Her co-worker, Michelle Roth, said nurses continue to be overburdened trying to care for 43 patients at a time while additionally handling post-hospital assessments, paperwork, feeding, medication regimens and any accidents that might occur on any given shift.

“It’s very difficult to give the care that we need to these residents if there’s only one nurse on the unit,” said Roth. “We really need something done with our staffing levels.”

Fair Acres Administrator Joseph Dougherty said the facility has actually reduced its dependency on outside nurses as a nursing shortage has improved in recent years.

Fair Acres now employs 206 full-time and per-diem nurses, he said, to cover the approximately 890 residents living at the facility. About 107 or 108 nurses typically work in any given 24-hour period, he said.

Doughterty and Councilwoman Christine Fizzano Cannon said the facility boasts 20 percent higher resident-care hours than state minimum requirements. Dougherty also said additional staff can be pulled from other areas if one floor gets particularly busy.

But Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals spokesman Bill Cruice said nurses still feel pay and staff levels need to be addressed in the contract negotiations.

“The nurses feel passionately that the residents of Fair Acres deserve the best possible care and they’re heartbroken when they don’t get that care, and when that happens, you can almost always point to staffing issues,” said Cruice.

While Doughterty and Cruice both said negotiations have been moving along positively, Cruice added that the county needs to recognize the fluidity of the market for nursing professionals and reflect that in pay.

“If you don’t look after the recruitment and retention issues for registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, the quality of care for residents at Fair Acres will deteriorate over time,” he said.