How Mount Sinai handled internal comms during a nursing strike
A playbook for alignment in labor disagreements.
When thousands of nurses walked off the job across New York City, Mount Sinai Health System had to quickly adjust how it delivered care to its patients and how it communicated strike-related changes to employees across the system.
During Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council Retreat in Key Biscayne, Florida, from May 6-8, Karen Wish, chief marketing officer and system strategic communications lead at Mount Sinai Health System, will share her experience navigating the work stoppage.
As the strike disrupted staffing and operations across the system, the communications team had to stay closely connected to how decisions were being made on the ground
“If you’re not embedded in the work, you can’t communicate it well,” Wish told Ragan. “You have to understand what’s actually happening on the ground before you can translate it for everyone else.”
Navigating strike-induced comms complexities
As Mount Sinai worked to adjust to gaps in staffing, patients were moved across facilities within the health system, requiring a chain of communication to be established among caregivers, administrators and support staff.
For Wish and her team, that meant mapping every operational decision to specific audiences and actions, including what frontline staff needed to act on, what managers needed to coordinate and what support staff needed to keep care moving.
“It’s about understanding the nuance of what’s actually happening and then asking, who needs to know this, and what they need to do with it,” Wish said. “Because the answer is different depending on where they sit in the organization.”
The specificity and timing of comms about patient transfers were key, especially because what frontline staff needed to execute in the moment differed from what managers needed to coordinate across teams.
“If we’re transferring patients, you have to understand exactly what that means operationally before you can explain it in a way that makes sense,” Wish said. “It’s not just the patient who needs to know — it’s everyone working on the floor who has to carry that message through.”
Throughout the strike, decisions that governed how the hospital operated in moments of pressure happened continuously. The team clarified shift responsibilities for workers, reinforced priorities for short-staffed facilities and made sure teams across locations were working from the same information. That meant communicating constantly, often multiple times a day.
Information had to be tailored in real time, with different levels of detail depending on whether employees were delivering care or supporting hospital operations. One-size-fits all communications weren’t an option.
“People receive information in different ways, at different times and in different formats,” Wish told Ragan. “So we deployed almost every communication in multiple ways to make sure it actually landed. It’s not just about what you say. It’s whether it reaches people in a way they can actually use.”
Each moment required discipline under tight timelines. Wish and her team needed the answers to who needed information, the speed with which they needed it, and the actions they needed to take with the information in mind. In addition, feedback from internal audiences during the strike helped Wish refine messaging and clarify instructions to ensure everyone was on the same page, no matter their role.
“You’re operating in real time,” she said. “What really matters is having trusted stakeholders who can tell you immediately what’s working and what’s not. If something isn’t landing, you’re not waiting. You’re adjusting the approach right away.”
Wish added that the focus was keeping the organization aligned as conditions changed.
“What we were really doing was creating an organization where people understand what’s happening, why it matters and what they need to do next,” she said. “That’s where communication had its biggest impact.”
To learn more about joining Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council, click here.
Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.
Great stuff, thanks!