Nurses at Maine’s Houlton Regional Hospital (HRH) will go on strike next week to protest the hospital’s failure to address staffing and patient care concerns.  

There are 55 nurses at HRH represented by the Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (MSNA/NNOC).

Why It Matters 

According to the union, the hospital’s emergency department is facing short staffing. Nurses said the hallways are full of patients due to a lack of available inpatient beds and the severity of their conditions.  

“I hope with the strike, the public and management see that we are not trying to cause problems,” Tenille Nason, an emergency department nurse at HRH, told Newsweek in an interview. “We truly believe in this cause. We truly believe patient care is suffering because they are not listening to what [nurses] are saying.”

This comes as nurses across the country have announced strikes amid ongoing contract negotiations. Nurses at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Michigan have been on strike for two months as negotiations over wage increases and staffing ratios continue.  

What To Know 

In September, nurses at HRH voted to authorize the strike after over a year of negotiations for a new contract. The previous contract expired last November.  

Nason has been a nurse in HRH’s emergency department for the past two decades. She told Newsweek that she’s very involved in the hospital but decided to support this strike because management hasn’t been listening to the concerns of nurses about short staffing.

Nason said that when she comes into work to relieve the night shift at 7 a.m., there are often only two nurses and 12-14 patients waiting to be evaluated. This overwhelms staff trying to prioritize who to care for first and often means there are not enough hospital beds for sick patients.

“Taking care of the patients properly when we’re short staffed is just not feasible,” she said. “We do the best we can, but it makes it very hard.”

She adds that HRH is a small hospital, but it serves several counties. Nason said patients and staff know each other and have seen patients grow from babies into adults.

“They know that I would not even think about stepping away from doing my job unless I absolutely did not feel that their safety and their care was at risk,” she said.

In a statement on Facebook, Houlton Regional Hospital said it has a contingency plan to ensure minimal to no disruptions in services. The hospital said it will remain open, saying it will continue to put patients and community members first despite the nurses’ choice to walk away. 

“Given the excitement expressed by our communities and patients, for our expanded services and focus on our employees, we are disappointed that the bargaining unit registered nurses have chosen to strike and step away from their patients,” Houlton Regional Hospital CEO Jeff Zewe said in a statement. “We have been meeting regularly with the nurses’ representatives and have made a fair and competitive offer that includes a substantial wage increase over the duration of the contract, along with enhancements to employee benefits.” 

The decision to strike also comes as the hospital’s announced the closure of its maternal services department in May. The hospital said there were several factors that made continued operations of an OB unit unsustainable, including declining birth rates at the hospital, difficulty staffing the OB unit, the high cost of staffing and maintaining the department and cuts in state reimbursement rates.  

“While the Board has delayed this decision throughout years of financial losses, these losses from the OB unit are a significant drain on the hospital’s overall financial performance, and one that would have a long-term impact on the hospital’s continued viability if not addressed,” the hospital board of trustees said.  

In April, nurses at HRH’s labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum department held a candlelight vigil against the closure of the department. 

Nason added that the absence of OB nurses in the emergency department has exacerbated staffing issues and puts patients at risk if nurses have to prioritize a mother in labor.

What Happens Next 

The nurses at Houlton Regional Hospital will go on a two-day strike at the hospital from Tuesday, November 18, to Thursday, November 20.  

“With the strike, we’re hoping to get better staffing so that our patients can be taken care of properly,” Nason said. “We’re hoping this allows management and everybody to see that we are fighting for our patients because we want to be able to provide the best care we can.”

What People Are Saying 

Michael MacArthur, a nurse in the HRH emergency department: “For the past several years, hospital management has consistently relied on travel nurses to help staff the hospital. We need to retain our experienced nurses who live in the area. We get plenty of nurses to come, but they leave. We need a strong contract that protects us and our patients and attracts and retains excellent nurses.” 

Houlton Regional Hospital CEO Jeff Zewe said in a statement: “Despite the union’s decision to strike, our focus remains on our patients and our community. I want to reassure everyone that our staffing levels meet or exceed national safety standards, as reflected in our strong quality outcomes.” 

Newsweek reached out to Houlton Regional Hospital for comment.

Have an announcement or news to share? Contact the Newsweek Health Care team at health.care@newsweek.com.

ELLSWORTH, Maine (WABI) – On Saturday, November 22, those who head to The Grand Theater in Ellsworth will get a chance to see the state of Maine in a way they’ve likely never seen before.

“Seasons of Maine” is a 48-minute film showcasing Maine’s natural beauty, and it was made by local filmmaker Evan Procko.

“Maine is such a unique, beautiful place, and I wanted to really make a special film to just show how beautiful it is, because I’ve seen videos of Iceland and Norway with just really relaxing music on it. And I just wanted to create something really special for Maine,” said Procko.

Evan is a 21-year old filmmaker who lives with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and he poured his love of the outdoors into this film.

“Evan is an amazing young man, very artistic. He’s always been into anything creative, anything he can do on canvas, on film, culinary.

Of course, he has a disability that’s rather destructive with his muscles and his use of his legs and his arms. So a lot of the time, I’ve helped him out with anything that needs to be lifted or moved, or if he’s creating art on canvas, I’ll hold his arm. He calls me Ratatouille, just like in the kitchen, you know? He’s conducting the orchestra, but it’s all him, I’m just the hands. But with this film, this was completely his project,” said Bill Procko, Evan’s father.

The film took two years to make, and on Wednesday Evan finally got to see it on the big screen.

“It means a lot, just to see something I created on the big screen, it’s pretty crazy to think,” said Procko.

General admission is $15 with all proceeds being donated to research for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

“For me, it’s, I get more joy out of helping people out. It means more to me to help people that are struggling with similar condition, of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, instead of just getting more money for myself, it just means so much more to me,” said Procko.

You can purchase tickets for the showing of “Seasons of Maine” by clicking here and you can view the full trailer by clicking here.

Copyright 2025 WABI. All rights reserved.

The Globe spoke to Seitz-Wald about his reporting on the Platner campaign, how the Villager approaches its political coverage, and whether local news outlets need to be able to effectively share their reporting outside of their communities. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I thought I was getting away from national politics, but they pulled me back in. The day before Platner launched, I got a text from an old source who I’ve known for a long time, who said, “I’ve got a candidate who’s gonna jump into the main Senate race. He’s a harbormaster of this small town, Sullivan.”

I got on the phone with Platner and was just blown away by how fully formed his message was and how articulate he was. We did a story on it, along with the New York Times and everybody else. And indeed, he did become a thing.

Then, of course, [Maine Governor Janet] Mills gets in, the “oppo” comes out, and the race suddenly takes on this whole other layer of interest and meaning. The thing that I was immediately seeing was that all the yard signs are still up, and the people that I talked to in the days after he announced who were into him were still supporting him.

That’s when I started to see there’s clearly something that’s being missed in the national coverage. I’ve covered probably hundreds of campaigns — I have seen up close and personal what a dying campaign looks like. I’m very familiar with a campaign on its last legs, and this is not that.

Absolutely. I think we all agree that there are not enough reporters in the rest of the country, and too many reporters in New York and DC. I agreed with that when I was a DC reporter.

When we live in an information ecosystem where there just are not many boots on the ground reporting up facts from how things are happening, and we simultaneously have this demand for instantaneous analysis and understanding of what’s going on the ground, you’re inevitably going to get false assumptions or perceptions, because people want to come to a conclusion right away about what’s happening. But we’re just not getting those information streams.

I do. We’re covering our communities, but we also are sort of spokespeople for the outside world for our communities, and that’s not a role that national media plays or feels equipped to play. But I think it’s appropriate for local media to sort of be champions of your community.

One of the things that I felt, and some of my colleagues felt, is that Maine was getting short shrift from the way it was being portrayed. “Oh they’re all willing to support a neo-Nazi, because it’s the whitest state in the country.” For us in Maine, that’s not what’s going on here, and it’s almost a little bit offensive. You want to speak up.

Absolutely, that’s the thing we think about a lot. And there’s a balancing test there. Frankly, we’re going after grant money. We just hired a director of development so that national media is nice, because everyone is vain and likes to say that. But there’s a strategic purpose there, which is to hopefully help us raise more money.

But the ultimate goal has to be for the local community. Anything that we are doing nationally is ultimately to serve the local community, directly or not. I think we’re very mindful of that.

We were four newspapers. We consolidated into one. The three towns had their own individual newspapers, and we’re now a regional paper. There’s inevitably some resentment and sense of loss, and I totally get that. I would love to live in a world where we could support four independent newspapers, but that’s just not the reality. So that criticism is valid.

We’ve definitely seen some increased traffic. One of the top search terms that gets people to the Villager is Graham Platner, but that’s obviously people who are not local. It’s nice to have that. But really, we care about the local audience.

(Following the interview, Seitz-Wald told the Globe that the the Villager gained roughly 100 new subscribers in the wake of the Times article.)

We are experts in our community, so we’ve set this very high bar for political stories where it’s like we need to have a clear local angle or a frame on it that is something that only we can do.

We did an early Platner story that was about his oysters — what did his oysters taste like. There’s a big aquaculture industry, and people care about that stuff. Ideally, any political story that the Villager does should be a political story that only the Villager could do.

Absolutely. I love national news. I love NBC. They were great to me.

But as much as I love covering national campaigns, I would be one of 50 reporters at an event. I have never felt more useful to the world than I do now. The first two Graham Platner events I went to, I was the only reporter there, and that’s the standard. If we’re not there, it doesn’t get covered. And then there’s not just no news about it for our community, but there’s no record about it for history.

And so it feels so vital and important what I’m doing, even though people would say it’s smaller. Maybe, but to me, it’s so much more impactful.

Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.