The nurses at Maine Medical Center have done an outstanding job on the front lines of the ongoing pandemic. They and the rest of our care team have provided outstanding care amid challenging circumstances, often at great personal cost.

During this time, Maine Medical Center and its parent, MaineHealth, have stood by them, doing everything possible to ease their burden, just as they have done everything possible to care for their patients.

Amid all this stress, it’s not surprising that some of our nurses have turned to the idea of bringing in a union to represent them, petitioning the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election. The hope is that a union will provide solutions to problems like the national shortage of nurses and the intense demands caused by a devastating disease.

We strongly believe bringing in a union would make it more difficult to work collaboratively with our nurses to address their concerns. An outside third party would not share our values of respect, integrity, excellence, ownership, innovation and being patient centered. More concerning is if that outside party actively undermines our efforts and sullies our reputation to further its own ends.

Unfortunately, we’ve already seen this to be the case, and we need to set the record straight.

National Nurses United, based in California, has led an effort to unionize MMC nurses that features blatantly false assertions about the support MMC and MaineHealth have provided their nurses during the pandemic. Their campaign makes clear they do not share our values.

As the mail-in ballot election set for the coming weeks has drawn closer, the union has amplified falsehoods in its public statements and through paid advertising as it tries to make its case against Maine Medical Center.

Let’s be clear. Throughout the pandemic, Maine Medical Center has supplied all its care team members, including its nurses, with all necessary personal protective equipment to keep them safe. MMC has also supported care team well-being by maintaining jobs, compensation and benefits despite significant financial losses. We have provided child care subsidies during the shutdown, and paid time off during quarantines, a policy that has allowed us to contain outbreaks quickly without unfairly affecting team members. Notably, even those care team members whose jobs were put on hold last spring by our decision to temporarily suspend many elective procedures were kept whole with their pay and benefits.

Despite a national nursing shortage, we have maintained consistently safe staffing levels. And Maine Medical Center has never compromised patient care and coverage as it has gone about the important work of educating our nurses about the pros and cons of union representation and their rights under the law.

And, finally, to claim that the care at Maine Medical Center is anything less than one would expect at the state’s leading major medical center is both disingenuous and inaccurate. Our Leapfrog “A” rating for safety, our three-time Magnet Status for nursing excellence and our selection by U.S. News and World Report as one of America’s top hospitals are but a few of the objective measures of excellence at MMC.

These false claims attempt to discredit our organization in the eyes of the public and also insult the hundreds of colleagues who worked to secure materials, train in infection prevention and safeguard our frontline care team members.

We respect the right of our nurses to vote on unionization. Throughout the campaign we have adhered to the law and our values in making our case that a union would undermine our best efforts. And, unlike the union, we have consistently advocated that every eligible nurse should cast a ballot.

We are incredibly proud of and grateful for the extraordinary effort put forth by our nurses during this global pandemic, and equally grateful for their role in making Maine Medical Center one of the nation’s finest hospitals. Is nursing easy? No. Is there more we can do, working collaboratively with our nurses, to make great care still better and their careers more rewarding? Yes.

We hope our nurses will choose to continue to work directly with us on these goals and reject representation from those who would try to tear us down to build themselves up.