The unionized employees of Calais Regional Hospital (CRH) are demanding that the hospital’s Board of Directors remove and replace their current CEO, Rod Boula. The employees include Registered Nurses, Medical Laboratory Scientists, and Technical employees, such as Laboratory Technologists and Radiology Technologists.

To emphasize this demand, over 80 percent of the unionized CRH employees publicly signed a “Petition of No Confidence” in CEO Boula and mailed it to each member of the hospital’s Board of Directors, the hospital’s Board of Trustees, and to each member of the Calais City Council.

In the Petition of No Confidence, the employees outlined several of their complaints against CEO Boula including:

• Allowing the hospital to remain in bankruptcy for over one year without a plan to fix the hospital’s financial problems or emerge from its bankruptcy.
• Misspending the hospital’s money during the bankruptcy (up to $75,000 per month in professional fees) and on its labor-relations attorneys (up to $8,000 per contract bargaining session with unionized employees).
• Forcing some employees to work back-to-back shifts over multiple days, endangering their safety and the safety of the public.
• Eliminating services essential to the local community (for example: CRH’s OB Department in 2017).
• Doubling and tripling employees’ health insurance out-of-pocket expenses, beginning on November 1st of this year.

According to the petition signed by employees, the decisions made by Boula have devastated their working environment: “...we have seen several of our most senior and experienced colleagues leave CRH for better opportunities...We are experiencing an all-time low for employee morale, with many persistent ‘holes’ in our schedules that management cannot fill.”

The petition further states: “We have concluded that one person is responsible for these problems in our hospital, our workplace and in our community.” They name CEO Rod Boula as that person.

In addition to the termination and replacement of Boula, the employees also request that the CRH’s Board of Directors make the hospital more accountable to the local community and resolve both outstanding union contracts “in a fair and just way.”

The employees are represented by the Maine State Nurses Association, which is affiliated with the National Nurses Organizing Committee and National Nurses United.